Loudmouths And Demagogues

by digby

I wrote a post yesterday about self-dealing Carville and Begala stepping on a useful strategy by blowing their own horns and was of the opinion that they screwed the pooch. I may have been wrong about that in one respect. When I wrote that I didn’t know that Obama campaign chief David Plouffe had written an op-ed on the subject, which does bring the whole thing further into the white house inner circle and indicates that they had decided to publicly engage beyond some simple sparring with the press secretary. It makes it a bit ridiculous to argue that Carville and Begala taking credit for their handiwork is a bad thing when the administration is obviously not attempting to keep its own fingerprints off of it either.

Anyway, perhaps I’m wrong about this, but I think the point still stands. I think it’s a bad idea for Democratic strategists to go around taking public credit for partisan schemes. Sincerity (even if it’s kabuki) is what makes these things play. The only one on the right I can think of who ever makes that mistake is the nutcase Roger Stone. And there is a long history of Democratic insiders spilling their guts to favored reporters to make themselves look good at the expense of their clients and the party.

For a thorough rundown of the week’s events in the Limbaugh story, see the NY Times’ Weekend Opinionator. There’s a lot of very interesting material there, especially from writers on the right, showing just how much dissonance and disagreement there is about the future of the party. The debate provides a pretty stark demarcation among the elites between those who think the future lies with Limbaugh thuggishness and those who (finally) see the destructiveness of his message.

But I think the most interesting passage is an interview with culture critic Neal Gabler, who wrote a book about Walter Winchell:

To get the longer view, however, the Opinionator had a chat with Neal Gabler, the biographer of Limbaugh’s closest historical analogue, Walter Winchell. “Limbaugh is a rabble-rouser, more like Father Charles Coughlin than Winchell,” said Gabler. “His job is to appeal to his section of the audience and, because it is reasonably large and vocal, he has the same kind of political leverage that Coughlin had.” Gabler continued:

Winchell, however, was tightly connected to the Roosevelt administration, which used him to batter opponents. He was a battering ram on which they wouldn’t have their fingerprints — they would feed him and use him to do dirty work they wouldn’t touch themselves. Limbaugh could have had a similar situation during the George W. Bush administration. Steele was right: his power is not based on politics, it’s based on entertainment. Great entertainers like Winchell and Limbaugh manage to simplify politics, to find ways of making it “us against them,” to find ways to dramatize, to demonize, to villainize, to narrativize. Eventually Winchell became a crank, but in an interesting way. He thought he was still a populist, but the political sands had shifted. The intellectual/liberal faction of the Democratic Party, with which he was once aligned, he began to see as elitist rather than populist. He didn’t think he had moved to the right, rather that these people left him behind as they moved “up.” And why did they leave him? Because he was an entertainer, he simplified things, and they thought it was seamy and degrading to be associated with him.

So, how does Limbaugh compare with Winchell. “He doesn’t,” said Gabler. “He doesn’t have Winchell or even Coughlin numbers of listeners, not close. And he’s not in the same league with Winchell as a broadcaster. Winchell was able to blend gossip, news and opinion in a seamless, surreal weave. If he had just sat there and bloviated, the audience would have gotten tired. Winchell could move popular opinion, whereas Limbaugh can only move party opinion.”

I would say, however, that his influence on the major media over the years has never been fully understood. Tim Russert had him on to do election coverage in 2002 and only disinvited him in 2004 because of protests. Howie Kurtz defended him as a mainstram guy in the face of Tom Daschle’s compaint that his commentary about him during the days after 9/11 was causing people to make death threats against him. This is not surprising in a media that openly admits that Drudge — a right wing smear artist — rules their world. Because of that, and the fact that there are literally dozens and dozens of “little Limbaughs” on the radio and on Fox TV, his reach is actually far bigger. He may not be able to directly move popular opinion but his influence over the past two decades is far beyond the numbers that listen to him every day.

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