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Rush is C-SPAN, Comedy Central and the Nostalgia network all in one: 100% politics and 100% show biz. And in that he's like nearly everyone else in public life. The "issues" in the Republican campaign are largely Hard Copy topics like adultery, dope smoking, draft dodging and politically correct itineraries for student vacations. On The McLaughlin Group, the Studs of weekend round-table shows, pundits pretend to be pit bulls. On the late-night talk shows opposite Limbaugh's, comedians pause in their mocking of Bush and Quayle to get serious for just a moment, folks, and put in a plug for Clinton.
Watch these statesmen in motley, clowns on the stump, and Limbaugh's mud track can look like the high road. He meets his own challenge -- to inform and entertain -- and those who don't get it are always free to tune out. But even some righteous liberals are closet Rushophiles, because the man is so good at what he does. And knows it. And tells you, in a voice whose every syllable bespeaks a 25-year apprenticeship in radio oratory, without fear of repetition or contradiction. If vainglorious were two words, he'd fit both of them. He has an ego made for radio.
Radio is the last intimate medium. For harried commuters and lonely homebodies, it is mouth-to-ear resuscitation, a voice crying in their wilderness. In the '30s, radio carried potent political messages, from Franklin Roosevelt's Fireside Chats to Fiorello La Guardia's reading of the comics during a newspaper strike to Father Charles Coughlin's charismatic hatemongering. Today that voice is still as personal as a conscience or a demon. Especially at midday, when the bass thud of a barroom rock band announces the arrival of Rush H. Limbaugh III, 41. "Ensconced in the Attila the Hun Chair at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies," Rush is ready to turn the disparate American radio audience into one big ear. "Turn it up, folks," he commands. "Listen loud."
You needn't bother; his personality is as loud and colorful as his neckties. But his audience does listen up, some of them in "Rush rooms" -- parts of restaurants where the show is piped in for the faithful. They'll talk back too, to offer either "mega-dittos" (indicating total agreement with the host) or nega-dittos. "When he calms down and stops horsing around," says erstwhile movie star Jane Russell, "he speaks common American sense, which we've been throwing into the toilet." Russell's husband, the crusty Texan John Peoples, adds, "If bulls--- was music, he'd be a brass band. But I love him."
Norman Lear, the TV mogul and co-founder of the liberal group People for the American Way, is a fan, sort of. "Real passion is at such a premium these days," Lear says. "In the land of the sitting and reading dead, Limbaugh's got passion, and thus he's watchable." To columnist Alexander Cockburn (the Nation), Limbaugh's is "a funny act. Humor always helps. But he seems to me the last surviving idiocy of the Reagan-Bush years. It's like those stars that give off light long after they've died. Long after everything Reagan-Bush stood for has collapsed into disaster, the sound waves continue, and you hear this mush peddler carrying on."