(3 of 5)
Oh, somewhere on the dial you can find liberals (like Mike Malloy of Atlanta's WSB), black nationalists (including several hosts on New York's WLIB) and a few leftists. Tammy Bruce, a lesbian feminist and head of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW, works weekends on Los Angeles' KFI. Jim Hightower, a folksy, funny Texas populist who is nearly as quick to criticize Clinton as he is the right wing, graces 180 stations.
"Liberals must stop hugging trees and start kicking some ass," says liberal syndicated host Tom Leykis. But even in sympathetic markets, liberals are the kickees. Surely the Bay Area is the Mecca (or, as Rush would say, the Moscow) of the California left. But in San Francisco, KSFO has just dumped all its moderate and liberal talk-show hosts -- including Leykis -- to go to a conservative format featuring Hamblin, Reagan, Emerson and Pat Buchanan. What's the problem with liberals? "They are genetically engineered to not offend anybody," says Tom Tradup, general manager of talk station WLS in Chicago. "People who go on the air afraid of offending are not inherently entertaining."
The trailblazer in entertaining, eager-to-offend conservatism was William F. Buckley Jr. in the early '60s. His cutting wit had the patina of moral certitude, in a fight his liberal opponents were often too genteel to win. Buckley's heirs (William Safire, Buchanan, P.J. O'Rourke) helped lift from Republicans the stigma of the pruney banker. On the radio side, conservative talk also had '50s and '60s pioneers: cantankerous Joe Pine and Bob Grant. Grant and Limbaugh, who have broadcast back to back on New York City's WABC since 1988, have set the limits -- one growly, the other comic-pompous -- for Right Radio.
Grant, a pro-choice conservative who can be gracious to guests and rapacious to callers, got a dose of his own malice last fall. Frank Lautenberg, the New Jersey Democratic Senator who was in a bitter race with Republican and frequent Grant guest Chuck Haytaian, ran ads stating that "Grant calls blacks savages, and called Martin Luther King a scumbag." A tri-state ruckus ensued, with New Jersey Republican Governor Christine Whitman declaring she would no longer appear on Grant's show and citizens calling for the host's scalp and other body parts. But all the heat didn't hurt him. Whitman was soon back on the show. Grant achieved his highest ratings in a quarter-century. And WABC now proclaims itself the No. 1 radio station in America.
Say this: Just on pungent personality, the right-wingers are usually more entertaining hosts than the drones of radio liberalism, who share flaws with their elected counterparts. Decades of power made Democrats soft, logy, too eager to compromise; they showed compassion but rarely passion. By the time Limbaugh went national in 1988, the Dems could do little but sleepwalk into the propeller. How could they know that the winning attitude of the '90s -- on radio and on the stump -- would be to show a killer instinct?