Media Channel

This article will appear in this Sunday’s Times Magazine. By Zev Chafets:

‘The Rush Limbaugh Show’ goes on the air every weekday at 12:06 P.M. Eastern Standard Time.

At one time, Limbaugh did his program from a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper he dubbed, with tongue-in-cheek grandiosity, the Excellence in Broadcasting Building. These days, he mostly broadcasts out of a studio in Palm Beach, Fla., which he calls the Southern Command, and describes on the air as a “heavily fortified bunker.”

In fact, Limbaugh’s show emanates from a nondescript office building on a boulevard lined with tall palms. There isn’t even a security guard in the lobby. The elevator opens directly onto a pristine anteroom furnished in corporate glass and leather. An American flag stands in the corner. Only a small, framed picture of Limbaugh, bearing the caption “America’s Anchorman,” reveals that this is the headquarters of one of the country’s most admired and reviled figures.

The anteroom was empty when I stepped off the elevator one afternoon in mid-February. Limbaugh receives very few visitors at work, and no journalists from the hated “mainstream media.” When I was buzzed into the control room, I was met by Bo Snerdly — a very large man in a Huey Newton beret — who glared at me. “Are you the guy who’s here to do the hit job on us?” he demanded in a deep voice.

“Absolutely,” I said.

Snerdly, whose real name is James Golden, held my eyes for a long moment before bursting into emphatic laughter.

“It’s just that we aren’t used to seeing reporters here,” said a woman named Dawn. She is a stenographer whom Limbaugh hired in 2001, after he went deaf. These days he has a cochlear implant that enables him to hear callers, but Dawn sends him real-time transcripts of on-air conversations, just in case.

“The media doesn’t know about this place,” she said. “They don’t know where we are. During Rush’s big drug story they staked out the whole town, even his house, but they never found us here.”

For the next hour I sat behind the glass panel of the control booth and watched Limbaugh at work in front of the “golden E.I.B. microphone.” Unlike Howard Stern or Don Imus, he has no sidekicks with him in the room. He does, however, keep up a running conversation with an unheard voice. I always assumed that this was just imaginary radio shtick. Now I saw that the voice was attached to a human interlocutor, Snerdly, who banters with and occasionally badgers Limbaugh via an internal talk-back circuit.

After the broadcast, Limbaugh waved me into the studio and offered me a seat directly across from him. The room’s acoustics make it relatively easy for him to hear, but he also reads lips.

I had come to talk to Limbaugh about his role in Republican Party politics. During the primaries he assailed John McCain as a phony conservative and apostate Reaganite. Despite Limbaugh’s best efforts, it now appeared that the Arizona senator would be the nominee. There was speculation that Limbaugh would not support him in November.

“I’ve never even met the man, never spoken to him,” Limbaugh said. “I’m sure there are things about him I’d like if we meet. This isn’t personal.” He then delivered a litany of the presumptive nominee’s personal failings — too old, too intense, too opportunistic, too liberal. But, he assured me, he would be with McCain in the fall. “It’s like the Super Bowl,” he told me. “If your team isn’t in it, you root for the team you hate less. That’s McCain.”

It already seemed, when I made my visit, that McCain’s opponent might well be Senator Obama, and I was curious to know how Limbaugh planned to take on America’s first African-American major-party nominee. “I’ll approach Obama with fearless honesty,” said Limbaugh, who speaks of himself in heroic terms on air and off. “He’s a liberal. I oppose liberals. That’s all that’s involved here.”

I asked if he had any specific tactics in mind.

“I haven’t yet figured that out exactly,” he said. “You know, I’ve had a problem with substance abuse. I don’t deal with the future anymore. I take things one day at a time.”

In this case, it took two. I was back in New York, listening to the radio, when I heard Limbaugh say: “Ladies and gentlemen, I had a conversation with a friend Wednesday afternoon after the program, and he said, ‘Nobody’s criticizing Obama. How are you going to do this? How are you going to handle criticizing the first black American to run for president?’ I said: ‘I’m going to do it the way I always do it. First, at the top of the list, I’m going to do it fearlessly. I’m not going to bow to political correctness. I’m going to do it with humor. I’m going to focus on the issues. I’m going to react to what he says. Simple. I’m going to do it just like it were any other case — he’s a man, right? He’s a liberal. How do I criticize liberals? I criticize them.’ But I have devised, ladies and gentlemen, an even more creative way of criticizing Obama. I have, just this morning, named a new position here on the staff that is the Official Obama Criticizer. The E.I.B. Network now has an Official Obama Criticizer. He is Bo Snerdly.”

Snerdly introduced himself as an “African-American-in-good-standing-and-certified-black-enough-to-criticize-Obama guy,” and declared that he was speaking, “on behalf of our E.I.B. brothers and sisters in the hood.” The bit was typical Limbaugh — confrontational, deliberately insensitive and funny. It was also a declaration of independence. Whatever special courtesies John McCain might plan to extend to Barack Obama, Limbaugh is going to conduct his air war, as he always has, by his own rules of engagement.

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