One of the great unknowns in politics is whether Big, Fat, Conservative Broadcast Idiots hold any remarkable sway over their audiences, or, like the great apes at the zoo, they're merely there for people to gawk at and listen to for amusement, and as a way to kill an hour or so.
With any luck that question will be answered this election year, as the biggest, fattest, most conservative broadcast idiot of them all ventures into the even more mysterious jungle of openly and stridently opposing his party's candidate for the Big House.
I write, of course, of Rush Limbaugh, he of 13.5-million weekly listeners who, it would seem, wouldn't know serious political philosophy from botany. If you've ever been gripped by sufficient masochism to tune in, you know what I mean. There they are, the fawning, sycophantic dupes of dittodom, queued up on the switchboard, hankering to get at Rush so they can regurgitate his wretched unenlightenment from the Dark Ages.
His shows appear to present classic, psychosociological studies in the frightening vein of, say, philosopher Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, but perhaps it's only the appearance that's real.
Rush may in fact represent less of an actual, loosely organized mass movement than merely a massive intellectual bowel movement. On-air, three-hours long, dumped on 600 stations, five times a week. We know not how Rush relieves himself on weekends, or where vicarious relief is found by his devoted listeners.
At any rate, the latter is my guess, although I confess it may be a poorly educated one. Yet everyone seems to be poorly educated in this hazy arena, so my guess is also as good as anyone's.
When it's all over, I'm venturing, this most reactionary of broadcast idiots will be found to have held only a negligible sway over his presumed legions of lapdogs -- and he may even soon go the way of his equally offensive and finally beyond-the-pale broadcasting forebear, Father Coughlin of the National Shrine of the Little Flower. Largely muzzled and forgotten.
For Rush has been fuming and sputtering to apparent little effect. Not long after he frantically rang the alarm -- "I’m here to tell you, if either of these two guys get [sic] the nomination, it’s going to destroy the Republican Party, it’s going to change it forever, be the end of it" -- his principal bete noire promptly went on to essentially secure said nomination.
And according to exit polling in Maryland, John McCain "won a plurality" of "frequent listeners of conservative talk radio," while the other of the "two guys" intent on destroying the Republican Party, Mike Huckabee, marched to victory in Virginia. If Limbaugh's influence was felt at all in those primaries, it was a mighty light touch.
McCain, however, may wish that Limbaugh's voice grows even louder. Because returning again to the era of Father Coughlin, Rush represents what Franklin Roosevelt denounced as "government by organized money" -- "the old enemies of peace, business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism [and] war profiteering" who were aligned in rabid opposition to the New Deal. But rather than accommodating them, rather than seeking peace with them, rather than staging powwows of compromise, Roosevelt announced: "I welcome their hatred." He then cleaned their clocks in the '36 election.
If McCain is shrewd -- and I think he is -- he will return the same fire against the on-air reactionaries and extremists of today, and thereby gain the allegiance of moderates and independents who otherwise would quake at the thought of a presidential candidate in bed with the malignant likes of a Rush Limbaugh.
In short, as Rush himself has suggested, his alienation from McCain may be the best thing that could have happened to McCain. The extreme right is shrinking, and Rush's intimation would seem to verify that he even he knows that. It's out of whack with the times, an aging and dying ideological dinosaur whose cranky intrusion into this race could cause any candidate more injury than benefit.
Finally, one last prediction; or, rather, less a prediction than the mention of another 1930s possibility. Should McCain win, with Rush having stayed on the hostile outside looking in, Mr. Limbaugh could well go the way of H.L. Mencken.
Mencken was unsurpassed in popularity as a political commentator right up until he turned his inky venom on the prevailing ideological pragmatism of the 1930s -- the far more popular New Deal. He failed -- refused -- to go with the electoral flow, and soon found himself marginalized and ultimately, nearly forgotten.
Should the Republican Party indeed moderate its ideas and behavior, Limbaugh could find himself as insignificant a voice as Mencken's became.
Such a development would almost be worth the Ascension of John McCain. Almost.