What is there to say about Rush Limbaugh that hasn’t already been said? The man was a giant. I would contend that Rush was one of the five most influential conservatives of the last forty years. The others on that list - Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump - all achieved the pinnacle of power in their chosen branch of government and revolutionized their institution and their party along with it.1 Only Rush achieved that power without ever having to stand for election.
Rush seized the opportunity granted by the death of the Fairness Doctrine to create an entirely new medium of communication: talk radio.2 He was a pioneer who revolutionized the conservative media landscape and played an essential role in the Republican Party’s historic victory in the 1994 midterms, breaking forty unbroken years of Democratic dominance.
If you don’t believe that Rush was a national political force, consider this: the last two Democratic presidents both ran for reelection against Rush Limbaugh almost as much as they ran against their actual opponents.3 Bill Clinton shamefully tried to blame the Oklahoma City bombing on talk radio without evidence, similar to the New York Times’ efforts sixteen years later to pin the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords on Sarah Palin (even though the shooter was a madman with no political agenda).
My first encounter with Rush Limbaugh was in 2012. On one of his shows, Rush decided to mock Sandra Fluke, an unknown Georgetown law student for comments she made at a public meeting. I won’t go into it here but you can read more about it here if you would like.4 My family never listened to him growing up, so I could not figure out why on earth some guy’s comments about some woman I’d never heard of were so important.
Only with time did I realize just how powerful Rush was, and how threatened the Obama team was by him, that they worked so hard to blow his crass, sexist comments into a major national scandal. He would later apologize, but the Obama campaign seized on these comments and used them as a foundation for the “War on Women” narrative they used to bludgeon Republicans in 2012 and 2014.
Most of what is good and bad in modern conservative politics, and in the Republican Party more broadly, can be traced back to Rush in some way. Rush Limbaugh was a complicated man, to be sure. I have no interest in rehashing every controversial statement he made in his long career. But today, I think it’s important to recognize the influence this man had on the political movement I consider myself a member of, and on our nation as a whole. Though I was not a fan of the game-show style nature of the award ceremony, Rush Limbaugh richly deserved the Presidential Medal of Freedom President Trump bestowed on him in honor of his accomplishments and all he has done for our movement and for our nation. On this Ash Wednesday, say a prayer for Rush and his family. RIP.
The next 5 is much less clear-cut, but my list would include Roger Ailes, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin and either Andrew Breitbart or George Will in case you were wondering.
This was especially fitting as the Fairness Doctrine was expanded by the Kennedy Administration specifically as a means to quash their political opponents and stifle freedom of speech, similar to their heavy-handed harassment campaigns against the civil rights movement. For more information see here.
Joe Biden will now be the first Democratic president since Jimmy Carter(!) to not be able to run for reelection against Rush Limbaugh.
I am not defending Rush’s comments. They were abhorrent. I am choosing not to dwell on them as I have a rule to not speak ill of the recently deceased. If you have a problem with that you can talk to our complaint department (it’s a trash can).