Radio: Big Mouths

Populist and popular, radio's right-wing pundit and gross-out wild man have new mega-best sellers

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As for Stern, somewhere between 4 million (according to the radio-rating company Arbitron, which may underestimate listeners to controversial shows such as Stern's) and 16 million (according to Stern's camp) listen to him on the radio, where, like Limbaugh, he broadcasts live for several hours every weekday. Stern's book came out two weeks ago, and there are 1 million copies after eight printings. It is, until Limbaugh's book supplants it, No. 1 on the hardcover best-seller lists. His TV interview show on cable's E! is often the highest-rated program on that (smallish) entertainment-news channel.

Very roughly speaking (and judging by a TIME/CNN poll), Limbaugh is about 2 1/2 times as big as Stern. "Howard Stern says what's on his mind," according to his book editor, Judith Regan. "Rush Limbaugh says what's on his mind," according to his book editor, Judith Regan. In terms of their relative media presences, says Regan, "Rush is the heavyweight champion of the world. Howard is a contender. He's in the ring."

It seems unnecessary to concede that Limbaugh and Stern are profoundly different creatures. At first glance -- and to hear both the Limbaugh camp and Stern tell it -- they are utterly dissimilar. "He hates to be compared to Stern," says Ailes. "Stern is a pure entertainer. Rush was invited to have dinner with Anthony Kennedy and Margaret Thatcher last month." Says Stern: "My biggest fear is being lumped in ((with Limbaugh))." It is easy to look no further than their obvious dissimilarities.

One is a fat, baldish, old-fashioned middle American guy with a delivery like Robert Preston in The Music Man, a conservative ideologue who has never owned a pair of jeans, gorges on $250 meals of caviar and steak, revels in drinking "adult beverages" and gets embarrassed when a friend makes a bawdy crack about a female reporter interviewing him. The other is a skinny, 6-ft. 5-in. longhair who wears jeans, dark glasses and five earrings, a teetotaler who eats no red meat and whose radio shows and book inevitably include stretches of Butt-head, uncensored sex raps. One is a cracker-barrel commentator descended from the Great Gildersleeve, Paul Harvey and Ronald Reagan, whose often arch, sometimes tiresome rants about "commie libs" have the propulsive fluency of parliamentary debate; the other, a radio verite comedian who is an odd fin-de-siecle hybrid of Joe Pyne, Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce and who rambles on maniacally about himself, show business and the world in general, variously appalling and exhilarating. They seem antithetical generational caricatures -- even though Limbaugh, 42, is a baby boomer only three years older than Stern.

Limbaugh is a more or less conventional pundit whose agenda is the standard public agenda -- government programs vs. free-market solutions, self-reliance vs. entitlements. He has real influence -- "the power," says Clinton White House consultant Paul Begala, "to put something like Zoe Baird on the radar screen." (He is a free-trader, and TIME has learned that President Clinton has dispatched Lee Iacocca to enlist Limbaugh in the Administration's campaign on behalf of NAFTA.)

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