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Stern doesn't seek power or influence, and doesn't have any. He is smart and often sensible but intellectually lazy. He lurches from a convincing take on the New York City mayoral race (he's for Republican Rudolph Giuliani) to leering consideration of Marla Maples' body to an acute inside-baseball dissection of the Fox network's cancellation of Chevy Chase and back to some babe talk. But he is nevertheless a social commentator with a large constituency that regards him as an across-the-board truth teller. Stern will never appear on a Washington round-table program, but his wildly, unwholesomely eclectic agenda is actually very much like that of an average Joe who doesn't tidily segregate his thoughts on sex and pop effluvia from his thoughts on health-care reform, and who doesn't see politics as the primary vehicle for his hopes and fears.
Sure, one's a prurient, free-associating rocker manque and one's a tub- thumping right-wing former bowler, but how much more illuminating to see Limbaugh and Stern as flip sides of a single brassy, very American coin. They are not just analogous but kindred phenomena, each man rising on adjacent zeitgeist updrafts. "They're both ambassadors in the culture of resentment," says Newsday media critic Paul Colford, who recently published The Rush < Limbaugh Story (St. Martin's Press; $19.95). In basic demographic terms their core radio audiences look similar: white men (a majority for Limbaugh, 75% for Stern) who are on the young side ("the Letterman demographic," says Ailes of Rush's viewers), people from the broad American middle class -- small- businessmen, taxi drivers, working stiffs who unapologetically enjoy action movies, who feel besieged by (and may secretly enjoy feeling besieged by) the nuttier extremes of political correctness.
Limbaugh and Stern are popular because their audiences consider them uniquely honest, commonsensical, funny and a bit reckless (more than a bit in Stern's case) at a time when most people on radio and TV seem phony, impersonal, dull, dissembling, hedging. Both are irreverent, acute, bombastic, iconoclastic, outlandishly populist rabble-rousers who make millions of dollars a year. They are national ids, gleeful and unfettered. Howard is Rush's evil twin, Goofus to his Gallant.
On the other hand, reduced to their essential messages, both Limbaugh and Stern are closer to the rough center, and closer to each other, than almost anyone customarily imagines. You're dubious? Consider the following diatribe: "You want the secret of life? Here it is . . . ((G))o to school if you're that age. If the teacher tells you to sit in the chair, you sit in the chair. If you don't feel like it, you force yourself, anyway. You get older, the routine doesn't change. You eat breakfast, you go to work, you come home . . . If you have kids, you live with the kids. You don't move out on your wife . . . And if you can't go along with these rules, you're a misfit." That's Stern, and it's typical. Rush may be the ultimate Reaganite, but Howard is a classic Reagan Democrat. (He voted for McGovern, Carter, Reagan, Reagan, Bush and Clinton.)