NYT Profiles Rush

The cover story of today's NYT magazine is a profile of Rush Limbaugh. You may have heard of him. It's interesting in places, telling some biographical information. He drives a half a million dollar car (and has a dozen others just like it), for instance. I can't say I know much about Rush, though. My officemate in grad school listened to Rush constantly on wireless with the speaker turned on until I requested a new office because I couldn't get any work done. My family, though, hang on his ever word, and I'm sure if I had a long commute and the opportunity that I'd pick up the habit of listening to him, too. This paragraph tells a little about his listeners, as well as his overall influence in the conservative movement, which has become such a significant part of the Republican party.

Limbaugh’s audience is often underestimated by critics who don’t listen to the show (only 3 percent of his audience identify themselves as “liberal,” according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press). Recently, Pew reported that, on a series of “news knowledge questions,” Limbaugh’s “Dittoheads” — the defiantly self-mocking term for his faithful, supposedly brainwashed, audience — scored higher than NPR listeners. The study found that “readers of newsmagazines, political magazines and business magazines, listeners of Rush Limbaugh and NPR and viewers of the Daily Show and C-SPAN are also much more likely than the average person to have a college degree.”

For his part, Limbaugh sees himself as a thinker as well as showman. “I take the responsibility that comes with my show very seriously,” he told me. “I want to persuade people with ideas. I don’t walk around thinking about my power. But in my heart and soul, I know I have become the intellectual engine of the conservative movement.”

In truth, Limbaugh is less a theoretician than a popularizer of what he regards as the correct conservative responses to contemporary issues. Most of his concerns are economic. “I consider myself a defender of corporate America,” he told me. Limbaugh is admired by the religious right, but he is far from pious on matters of adult behavior. He is also one of the few commentators — left or right — who never speaks cloyingly about America’s obligation to its children and grandchildren.

Ever the radical, Rush also listed six things he'd do if elected President. The flat tax is in here, which we studied briefly in grad school (I only remember hearing that it had some significant problems, but I was so bored by tax policy I did all that I could to not remember the presentations we gave on it).

1. Open the continental shelf to drilling. Ditto the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

2. Establish a 17 percent flat tax.

3. Privatize Social Security.

4. Give parents school vouchers to break the monopoly of public education.

5. Revoke Jimmy Carter’s passport while he is out of the country.

6. Abandon all government policies based on the hoax of man-made global warming.

The article does get more interesting about 2/3 in when it starts to discuss the core of his beliefs and who his heroes are. There's more discussions of his conspicuous consumption, if you can call it that, in the first half. But here are a few paragraphs of him talking about his real heroes, like Reagan.

More recently, Dick Cheney toasted Limbaugh at a dinner party; a copy of the vice president’s remarks hangs on Limbaugh’s wall at home. But Limbaugh’s real hero and constant role model is Ronald Reagan.

Limbaugh admires many aspects of Reaganism, but he is especially animated by his belief in American exceptionalism. “Reagan rejected the notion among liberals and conservatives alike who, for different reasons, believed America was in a permanent state of decline,” he wrote to me in an e-mail message. “He had faith in the wisdom of the American people. . . . He knew America wasn’t perfect, but he also knew it was the most perfect of nations. Reagan was an advocate of Americanism.” In response to a separate question, he wrote: “America is the solution to the world’s problems. We are not the problem.”

Limbaugh said he believes that President George W. Bush is well meaning but far from the Reagan standard of excellence. “I like President Bush,” he wrote me, “but he is not a conservative. He is conservative on some things, but he has not led a movement as Reagan did every day of his career. Bush’s unpopularity is due primarily to his reluctance to publicly defend himself and his administration against attacks from the left. . . . The country has not tilted to the left in my view. What has been absent is elected conservative leadership from the White House down to the Congress.”