The voice is intimate, sonorous, authoritative, urgent. It has stories to ( tell, issues to explore, products to promote. One product above all: itself. Turn on one of 400 radio stations around midday, and listen:
"Greetings, conversationalists across the fruited plain, this is Rush Limbaugh, the most dangerous man in America, with the largest hypothalamus in North America, serving humanity simply by opening my mouth, destined for my own wing in the Museum of Broadcasting, executing everything I do flawlessly with zero mistakes, doing this show with half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair because I have talent on loan from . . . God. Rush Limbaugh. A man. A legend. A way of life."
At first listen, the mind spins, the ear reels. It sounds as if Ted Baxter, the preposterously pompous anchorman on the old Mary Tyler Moore sitcom, had escaped into the ether and had been resurrected as a talk-show host. Dial scanners have to wonder: Is this guy kidding? Well, of course. Sometimes. As when he announces the Limbaugh neutron bomb: "It vaporizes liberals but leaves conservatives standing." Or when he bleats a duh-duh-lut duh-duh-lut fanfare, announcing a Pee-wee Herman news update to the tune of Michael Jackson's Beat It. Or when he handicaps N.F.L. games by political correctness: "The Eagles, an endangered species, will of course cover the spread against those pillaging, earth-destroying Cowboys." Or when he (infrequently) admits to a gaffe and as punishment spanks himself and squalls like a colicky baby. Or when he sucks on a bottle of diet iced tea and snorts like a happy hog at the trough.
These days Limbaugh, 40, must be in pig paradise. His daily New York City- based harangue -- three hours of nothing but Limbaugh pontificating on political and social issues with only occasional phone calls from listeners -- is the most popular talk show on radio, reaching 2 million people at any moment and nearly 8 million during the week. It has made Limbaugh a millionaire, a richly satisfied limousine conservative and a star. His personal appearance fee has leaped from $1,200 three years ago, when his show was first syndicated, to $25,000. His "Rush to Excellence" speaking tours sell out and do a brisk business in Rush T shirts and bumper stickers. He has signed with Simon & Schuster to write a book, The Way Things Ought to Be, and is planning with Republican media mastermind Roger Ailes a half-hour nightly Rush to television. And, accolade of accolades, the moon-faced monologuist had his portrait painted by LeRoy Neiman.
In one sense, Limbaugh is only the latest and most extreme in a line of right-wing savants, from William F. Buckley Jr. to William Safire to Patrick Buchanan to P.J. O'Rourke, whose Manichaean world view and scathing wit make them livelier pundits than anyone in the gray liberal establishment. But he is also, and mainly, an old-fashioned radio spellbinder in the seductive Midwestern tradition of Jean Shepherd, Ken Nordine and Garrison Keillor. "Rush utilizes the medium better than any talk-show host I have ever heard," says veteran comedy writer Ken Levine, who with his partner David Isaacs is developing a TV series loosely based on Limbaugh. "He sounds like a good B novel you just can't put down."