Rush Limbaugh: Always Right By Zev Chafets |
October 29, 2010
With his influence at its peak, the radio host outlines
his policy wish list.
People sometimes ask Rush Limbaugh if he has plans to run
for public office, and his answer is always the same—he
can’t afford the pay cut.
This is a rare understatement by El Rushbo. His annual
income is greater than the combined salary of the entire
U.S. Senate (and you can toss in a few dozen congressmen
and cabinet secretaries for good measure). “I certainly
don’t derive my living by what goes on in Washington,
and I’m not dependent on what happens there,”
he boasted to his radio audience in September. “The
further away that city is from my life, the more prosperous
I am.”
Limbaugh, who lives like a pasha in an oceanside estate
in Palm Beach, Fla., doesn’t need to go to Washington
to be heard there. His voice carries to the nation’s
capital and beyond, to every state and congressional district
in the country. The Rush Limbaugh Show is on the air three
hours a day, five days a week, carried by some 650 radio
stations. Industry estimates put his weekly audience somewhere
between 15 million and 20 million. Talkers Magazine recently
named him the most important radio host of all time.
Limbaugh has wielded political influence since his show
first went national 22 years ago. In 1994 he was so important
to the Republican congressional landslide that the GOP House
freshman class made him an honorary member. But never before
in his long career has Limbaugh had the degree of political
influence he currently enjoys. It is not an exaggeration
to say, as former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel
did, that Limbaugh is “the voice and the intellectual
force and energy behind the Republican Party.” He
intends to use that force and energy to shape the Republican
side of the next Congress.
In a recent e-mail exchange, Limbaugh laid out his to-do
list, which includes repeal of the health-care law and the
financial-regulatory-reform bill; ending the ban on offshore
drilling; the reprivatization of General Motors, Chrysler,
and the student-loan program; a spike in the heart of cap-and-trade
legislation (he regards global warming as a hoax); the elimination
of the capital-gains tax; a reduction of the corporate tax
rate to 20 percent; and replacement of the progressive income-tax
code with a flat or “fair” tax.
Limbaugh is aware that it is very unlikely that there will
be enough votes in Congress to achieve any of this. But
that isn’t the point. He wants to use the next two
years as an educational seminar on what he regards as the
evils of Obama-style liberalism. “The mistake the
GOP made in 1994 is that they stopped teaching after they
won,” he says. What should the GOP do to make its
point? “Send Obama a repeal bill every week and make
him veto it,” he suggests. “My attitude is,
who says we can’t override his vetoes? The Republicans
are being sent to Washington to stop the Obama agenda. And
it is not just Republicans sending them to D.C. Lots of
independents and Democrats are going to vote for Republicans
to stop this.”
This hell-no strategy requires hard-line congressional
leaders. Lately Limbaugh has been going after Republican
elites in Washington who are, in his opinion, overly given
to compromise. He isn’t yet opposing John Boehner
or Mitch McConnell, but if and when they seem to be going
wobbly, he already has his eye on possible alternatives—Mike
Pence, Michele Bachmann, and Paul Ryan in the House; Jim
DeMint and Tom Coburn in the Senate.
Limbaugh is contemptuous of the conventional wisdom that
Republicans must moderate their ideology in order to win
elections. “Real conservatism”—by which
he means Reaganism, broadly speaking—“wins every
time it is tried,” he says. He wants to build a political
party so ideological that moderates can’t even be
nominated. With that in mind, in mid-September he announced
a revision of the long-held Buckley Rule, William F. Buckley’s
dictum that Republicans should always vote for the most
conservative candidate with a chance to beat his Democratic
opponent. “It’s time,” he informed his
audience, “for the Limbaugh Rule to supplant and replace
the Buckley Rule … In an election year when voters
are fed up with liberalism and socialism, when voters are
clearly frightened of where the hell the country is headed,
vote for the most conservative Republican in the primary,
period.”
This pronouncement was timed to help Tea Party favorite
Christine O’Donnell defeat the more moderate Mike
Castle in the Delaware primary. Republican establishment
pros like Karl Rove have argued that O’Donnell was
a sure loser in November, and could cost the Republicans
control of the Senate, but Limbaugh dismisses this as self-serving
Beltway thinking. “What good are 51 votes if a minimum
of three are unreliable?” he asked. “The primary
reason [the GOP establishment] wants 51 votes is to get
the chairmanships.”
Limbaugh’s support for O’Donnell was by no
means surprising. Although he has never publicly claimed
leadership of the amorphous Tea Party, it is a mirror of
Limbaugh’s longstanding themes of small government,
low taxation, tight immigration enforcement, the belief
in American exceptionalism, and a sense of estranged hostility
from the “country-club wing” of the GOP. The
Limbaugh show is the largest daily gathering of Tea Partiers,
and he has used it to raise money for candidates such as
O’Donnell and Sharron Angle of Nevada. He has also
insisted that Tea Partiers resist any impulse to leave the
GOP and morph into a third party.
If the polls are right and there is a conservative Republican
landslide this week, Limbaugh will turn his attention to
imposing the Limbaugh Rule in 2012. I recently asked him
to rate a list of the leading aspirants—Newt Gingrich,
Haley Barbour, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee,
Tim Pawlenty, and Chris Christie—on a scale of 1 (if
this is the nominee, I’m moving to Costa Rica) to
10 (Reagan redux). In reply he gave Huckabee a 4; Pawlenty,
Gingrich, and Romney 6’s; Barbour a 7. Palin and Christie
each scored an 8.
Limbaugh arrived on the national scene too late for the
Reagan glory days, and although he occasionally visited
both Bushes at the White House, he was never more than a
guest. But if Palin, Christie, or some other 8 or 9 (there
is no 10 but Limbaugh) were to get elected president, Limbaugh
told me that he might be willing, under the right conditions,
to serve as a dollar-a-year adviser to the administration.
It would mean, of course, spending time in the hated capital,
but a guy with a private jet can commute to Palm Beach.
And the pay cut would be mitigated by a precipitous drop
in his personal income tax. The biggest drawback would be
that a senior job might require a hiatus from the airwaves.
His audience would miss him, but I can think of quite a
few liberal Democrats (and even more moderate Republicans),
who would be very happy to put up the dollar. For these
adversaries, it would be a great deal. No adviser, to any
president, is likely to have the kind of influence Rush
Limbaugh has right now.