‘Talent On Loan From God’: What People Still Don’t Understand About Rush Limbaugh

For some reason, when I heard of the passing of the 70-year-old Rush Limbaugh from lung cancer, oddly enough, a scene from the TV series Mad Men came to mind. Don Draper, the mysterious and dapper ad man, explains to enthralled Kodak executives that the most important idea in advertising is new. “It creates an itch,” he explains. “You simply put your product in there as a sort of calamine lotion.” I think such a concept is at the heart of why “El Rushbo” as he was affectionately known by his loyal legions of over 20 million daily listeners, (and “Satan” by the Left in whose boot he was a burr for 37 years) was so successful. He was the first of what would be a media counter-revolution. A conservative backlash to what many across “fly-over country” saw as an ever steeper and more pervasive leftward tilt to the media and news sources they’d once trusted.

In 1984, when Limbaugh truly launched his career as the country’s premier political talk radio host at Sacramento-based KFBK, the media landscape was a barren place wherein alternative viewpoints had few if any outlets. In my hometown of Chicago, for example, if you wanted news you had a very limited, and ideologically monolithic, choice of media outlets. Your national news was confined to ABC (Peter Jennings), NBC (Tom Brokaw), CBS (Dan Rather), a few local stations like WGN and WTTW, PBS, some obscure UHF outlets, and in Chicago, two newspapers. The internet didn’t really exist. FM radio was mostly music, AM very hard to even tune into. And that was it.