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For some comics, the subject of Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan is as fertile as Bush-Quayle. Will Durst, who refers to Limbaugh as "Jabba the Talk Show Host," says, "Buchanan had a killer instinct; he wasn't afraid to lick up the blood. But Rush leaves it there and just chews off the flesh." Harry Shearer, the actor (This Is Spinal Tap, The Simpsons) and host of his own politico-comic radio show, is kinder, gentler to Limbaugh: "This country runs on personality, not on ideas. I think if Rush were spouting diametrically opposed ideas, he'd be just as popular. The only people he is dangerous for are the people in time slots opposite him."
Limbaugh may be a fresh bag of wind to the radio and TV audience, but his family -- a prominent Republican brood in Cape Girardeau, Missouri -- has heard it all before. "He didn't start talking until he was two," says his mother Millie, "and then he didn't stop." The ideas were familiar too -- a kind of birthright for Rush. "Echoes of my dad reverberate through everything my brother says," explains Limbaugh's brother David, 39, a lawyer who helped Rush assemble The Way Things Ought to Be. "My dad, more than my brother, was the black sheep. He was a maverick, the lone, passionate voice of conservatism. My brother's success is a kind of vindication of my father's lifework in politics." If there is a difference between the lawyer with the booming voice and his radio-star son, the family says, it is in Rush's impish, rowdy sense of humor. "I don't want to brag," Millie says, "but I say he got his sense from his dad and his nonsense from me."
Rusty, as they called him, fell in love as a kid and never snapped out of it. The object of his obsession was radio. "I was jealous of the morning guy, who seemed to be having a lot of fun," he recalls, "while I was dreading getting ready for school every day. It's just that simple." After his sophomore year he abandoned football and debating and got a job at a local radio station. He never studied voice or diction, and during a stint at Southeast Missouri State University he flunked Speech 101, because he did not outline his speeches. And for the next decade, his career sounded more like crr-rash! He was fired from four Pennsylvania and Missouri radio stations and, after a five-year stint, from the marketing department of the Kansas City Royals. Not until he replaced Morton Downey Jr. on a Sacramento, California, station in 1984 did he come close to success. "Up until then," he says, "I failed at everything I did. On occasion, I had potential. On occasion, I was a guy who 'might make it if I could just learn to do this or do that.' "
Limbaugh also had two failed marriages. He was wed briefly, in 1977, to Roxie McNeely, a secretary. "I was doing what I thought I had to do. There was romance in the idea of being married. It was just the wrong reasons." He wed Michelle Sixta, a college student, in 1985; they divorced in 1991. "The love had just vanished," he says. "We're still friendly."