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Stern graduated with good grades from prestigious Boston University, and has assembled an unbroken onward-and-upward resume of better and better radio jobs ever since. Limbaugh dropped out of Southeast Missouri State after a year and had a nondescript disk-jockey and p.r. career, getting fired from five jobs during his 20s and 30s. Howard met his wife in college 19 years ago, married her four years later and proudly says he has been faithful to her. Alison Stern, the very picture of the cheerful, wholesome middle-American housewife, raises their three daughters, ages 9 months to 10 years, at the family home in a conservative well-to-do Long Island suburb. "I look around at the creeps and mutants out there," the fretful dad writes in Private Parts, "and the idea that these idiots are going to invade my life and marry my daughters at some point really frightens me." Limbaugh has been married twice, the first time for 18 months, the second time to a Kansas City Royals usherette; he is childless and lives alone in a small apartment on Manhattan's ultra-liberal Upper West Side.
Which is not to suggest that Limbaugh's ideological sincerity and coherence are anything less than total. He plainly believes what he says and mostly argues his cases lucidly, particularly by radio standards. Nor, in this post- Reagan age, can he be called an extremist.He harps on liberal straw men in a way that seems more properly circa-1973 ("long-haired, maggot-infested, dope-smoking peace pansies"), and his logic can be unforgivably specious (against the pro-choice argument for abortion:"Can a woman choose to steal, using her own body?"). But in fact his views on abortion are relatively nuanced. Nor is it kooky or even wrong to assert, as Limbaugh has, that the risk of heterosexual AIDS and estimates of the homeless population have been exaggerated for political reasons, that increased school expenditures don't necessarily produce better education, that means testing for Social Security would be a fine idea, that taking responsibility for one's own life is all-important.
Limbaugh and Stern exist in parallel universes, but in symbiosis. Stern was successfully raising the threshold of provocative radio performance for years before Limbaugh came along. And certainly Limbaugh's unbudging commitment to free speech and the free market help make Stern possible. Despite the conventional wisdom, both endure and grow in popularity, Limbaugh remarkably so: his radio audience has increased 50% in each of the past two years. Will they be hectoring and outraging all over the airwaves a decade from now? Stern is smart enough to think he won't be. Limbaugh probably will be unless he really triumphs and a Reaganite Republican such as Bill Bennett is elected President, which could moot a lot of the national appetite for his political evangelizing.