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Entertainers And Politics

Hewitt (via Ross): Rush eschews “leadership.” He doesn’t tell people who to vote for or where to show up and march. This is simply and obviously not true. In 1992 during the primaries, Limbaugh went so far as to endorse Buchanan against Bush (as did National Review), reflecting the deep dissatisfaction that many partisans had […]

Hewitt (via Ross):

Rush eschews “leadership.” He doesn’t tell people who to vote for or where to show up and march.

This is simply and obviously not true. In 1992 during the primaries, Limbaugh went so far as to endorse Buchanan against Bush (as did National Review), reflecting the deep dissatisfaction that many partisans had with Bush the Elder at the time. As the ’08 primaries wore on, he never explicitly endorsed anyone but made it very clear that he regarded both Huckabee and McCain (i.e., the people winning most of the primaries) as great dangers because they were supposedly trying to “reinvent” the party. If he didn’t tell people whom to vote for, he certainly told them which votes were wrong in his eyes. During the Democratic primaries last year, he explicitly urged his listeners to participate and vote to prolong the Democratic contest, which may have been a waste of time for all concerned, but it was clearly a case of Limbaugh attempting to lead his listeners in a certain direction to achieve a political result that he believed would help the GOP. To some limited extent, he was able to persuade people to follow his lead in some of these cases.

As Ross noted, Hewitt is on the right track when he identifies Limbaugh as filling an Oprah-like role on the right, but there is a crucial difference between them. Unlike Oprah, who ventured into partisan politics for the first time in the last election, Limbaugh’s entire act is now focused on serving as a conservative spokesman and unofficial strategist for the GOP. As often as he and his defenders keep crying, “Entertainer!” at the first sign of trouble, he constantly poses as something more important than an entertainer even while he is engaged in his performance.

In this, he is rather more like Bono, but even Bono cannot quite fuse his role as entertainer and his role as activist so completely. Bono has given benefit concerts in the past for various causes that would normally be identified with the political left, but to a large extent he has tried to keep his entertaining and his political activism in two distinct arenas. Limbaugh cannot do this, because his entertainment is political talk, but that necessarily means that he is never going to be merely an entertainer, just as Al Franken was never going to be merely a comedian once he went into talk radio. (Franken has since taken the next logical step and run for office.) Until and unless political activists and rank-and-file conservatives insist that Limbaugh be taken just as seriously as they are willing to take Bono or any other celebrity activist, they will be stuck with an entertainer for one of their main leaders who nonetheless does not lead responsibly because he can always declare when things get difficult, “Don’t look at me–I’m just providing entertainment!” As soon as the latest controversy dies down, he will then start spouting off on the issue of the day, as if to say, “Hey, look at me–I’ve got something important to say!”

P.S. The title of Hewitt’s post suggests that he doesn’t quite believe his own claim that Limbaugh is not a political leader, since “the Speech” invokes (who else?) Reagan, c. 1964.

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