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:
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.”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.