Democrats target controversial radio chat show host Limbaugh

AMERICA:Democrats are linking Republicans to Ross Limbaugh's call for the president to fail

WITH HIS popularity still at record levels and his allies in key party positions, President Barack Obama is the undisputed leader of the Democratic Party.

But who leads the Republicans? According to the White House, it is neither Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele nor the party’s leaders in Congress – Mitch McConnell and John Boehner – but conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

“He is the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party,” White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said this week.

As the keynote speaker at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Limbaugh defended his statement a few days before Obama took office that he wanted the new president to fail. The talk show host said that if Obama changes course and embraces conservative principles, he ought to succeed but if he continues on a course Limbaugh views as socialist, his policies should fail.

The president’s supporters have been hammering away at Limbaugh’s declaration, suggesting that he is simply saying out loud what Republicans in Congress really feel.

“He has been up front about what he views and hasn’t stepped back from that, which is he hopes for failure. He said it and I compliment him for his honesty. But that’s their philosophy that is enunciated by Rush Limbaugh and I think that’s the wrong philosophy for America ,” Emanuel said.

Pro-Democrat groups have run television ads linking the Republican leadership to Limbaugh’s call for the president to fail and Democratic supporters James Carville and Paul Begala have returned to the theme repeatedly from their commentators’ perch on CNN.

The Democrats received a boost when Steele made a grovelling apology to Limbaugh after the RNC chairman insisted that he was his party’s leader and described some of the talk show host’s remarks as “ugly” and “incendiary”.

“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh. I was maybe a little bit inarticulate,” Steele said. “There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”

As a former brother-in-law to Mike Tyson, Steele knows when to back away from a bruising fight that he can’t win but his apology was especially humiliating because he was the third prominent Republican to bend the knee in recent weeks after criticising Limbaugh.

In his 20 years as a broadcaster, Limbaugh has made numerous remarks that are tasteless or offensive but his call for Obama to fail is not among them. Why, after all, should a conservative want a liberal president to succeed?

According to a report in Politico this week, the Democratic focus on Limbaugh is no accident but is part of a strategy cooked up by Emanuel, Carville and Begala as long ago as last October.

“The strategy took shape after Democratic strategists Stanley Greenberg and James Carville included Limbaugh’s name in an October poll and learned their longtime tormentor was deeply unpopular with many Americans, especially younger voters.

Then the conservative talk-radio host emerged as an unapologetic critic of Barack Obama shortly before his inauguration, when even many Republicans were showering him with praise,” the online newspaper reported.

“Soon it clicked: Democrats realised they could roll out a new GOP bogeyman for the post-Bush era by turning to an old one in Limbaugh, a polarising figure since he rose to prominence in the 1990s.” If Republicans are uncomfortable about the focus on the talk show host, Limbaugh is loving every minute of it and one analysis yesterday suggested that the number of Americans tuning in to his daily show almost doubled this week to 25 million.

“The administration is enabling me,” Limbaugh told Politico. “They are expanding my profile, expanding my audience and expanding my influence. An ever larger number of people are now being exposed to the antidote to Obamaism: conservatism, as articulated by me.”

Begala insists that he is not taking direction from the White House and that he is targeting Limbaugh because “I don’t like him”, but the Democrat strategist clearly hopes that the spotlight remains on the conservative commentator for as long as possible.