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The Man Who Ate the G.O.P.
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Candidate
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Mar 31, 2009 11:56am |
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| Category | Profile |
| News Date | Tuesday, March 31, 2009 05:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | In an ailing radio industry, with a graying audience and a pro-government landscape, Rush Limbaugh should be shuffling off into irrelevancy. Instead, his ever more outrageous attacks have everyone debating whether he’s the G.O.P.’s de facto leader, while the party shapes its ideology to fit his needs.
Rush Limbaugh, it seemed to me, had to be in huge trouble. Beyond his history of drug problems—in liberal circles there remains a constant is-he-isn’t-he speculation about the status of his prescription-painkiller addiction—beyond even the fact that the mighty conservative tide which he’d ridden to such success had certainly peaked, there were the terrible problems in his core business. Radio advertising rates were falling—even before the recession—Internet competition was rising, and Rush’s much-vaunted audience of 14 million was down from its high of 20 to 25 million during the Clinton years to closer to cable-TV size. The view at MSNBC was that, on a minute-by-minute basis, Limbaugh’s audience was now no bigger than that of its liberal stars, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.
So, when, in the beginning of February, Limbaugh said he hoped that the new president would fail in his efforts to deal with economic calamity, this seemed much more like a desperate bid to stay in the game than it did a stroke of master showmanship. By any logical assessment of behavior, it still seems as if the man may be imploding. And yet, within a month of his issuing his provocative or nihilistic view about an Obama-led recovery, the argument had become not whether he was hopelessly marginalized but whether he was the most significant figure in the Republican Party.
The dirty little secret of conservative talk radio is that the average age of listeners is 67 and rising, according to Sinton—the Fox News audience, likewise, is in its mid-60s: “What sort of continuing power do you have as your audience strokes out?” |
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