You may have heard that the man who many say saved AM radio, Rush Limbaugh, died recently. He was a nonpareil among radio talk show hosts, an enormously popular and controversial talker. His fans adored him both for his conservative commentary and for bringing diversity to mass media while opponents considered him the devil incarnate. My parents-in-law first brought him to my attention sometime in the late 1980s. He was the man with the booming voice, rotund frame, and ever-present cigar.
It took Limbaugh decades of backwater radio work to make it to the big time, which coincided with Bill Clinton's presidency. To many Americans' disgust Clinton brought a liberal, libertine atmosphere into national office. At the time there were few places to which they could turn for contrary opinion—certainly not to mainstream media which were decidedly liberal and concentrated in just a few places. Limbaugh's timing, though inadvertent, was meticulous. He quickly found a huge audience of “dittoheads,” so named because they agreed with him across the board.
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Incredulous liberals never figured him out. They thought he led his followers by their noses, influencing them like a sort of pied piper. But Limbaugh knew better. He attracted legions not through a mesmerizing influence but because he was saying what they thought while no one else was. Not the first conservative radio talk show host, he nevertheless opened a path for conservative talk radio as an alternative to the monotone media. He did the seemingly impossible, which even a few of his liberal nemeses acknowledged: keeping millions of listeners glued to his show 15 hours a week for decades on end. Successful radio talk show hosts of any political stripe are a special breed; gaining and keeping an audience is a rare skill.
Limbaugh's success goaded the left into doing its own radio shows, which at least on the national level failed. Liberals didn't realize that grim, humorless chat doesn't work well on radio. Limbaugh was entertaining as well as provocative and contrary, which many misunderstood. They thought him a showman faking agreement with conservative America to boost his popularity. What he did was to combine astute criticism and commentary on the buffooneries of the day with sarcasm, parody and spoofing.
He sometimes did the inexcusable: referring to Chelsea Clinton as the White House dog, or while correctly making mincemeat of Sandra Fluke's absurd movement to make taxpayers pay for contraceptives, called her a slut. He was also, in this writer's opinion, wrong on just about every foreign policy issue he favored. Endless war in Afghanistan and Iraq was “doing God's work.” America as the beacon of light and freedom to the world justified its imperialism, making the military an always-praiseworthy part of America's divine mission. Limbaugh never saw America's blood-soaked foreign disasters, one after the other, as wrong.
But his analysis of domestic issues was often spot on. He brought things up in a way that no one else had but still made sense. He was a pioneer with “half his brain tied behind his back just to make it fair.” For that he was irreplaceable.
Nelson lives in Casselton, N.D., and is a regular contributor to The Forum’s opinion page. Email him at dualquad413@gmail.com.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Forum's editorial board nor Forum ownership.
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March 06, 2021 at 08:00PM
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