The GOP: Do Beck and Limbaugh help, or hurt?

Who will lead Republicans back to power? said David Brooks in The New York Times. If you believe the self-serving showmen Glenn Beck of Fox News and radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, it’ll be them. High on “the myth of their own power,” Beck and Limbaugh portray themselves as leaders of a populist rebellion that will soon drive Barack Obama and the Democrats out of Washington. But let’s take a trip back to 2007, before the Republican presidential primaries. Limbaugh and other conservative talk-jocks were “over the moon about Fred Thompson,” anointing the sleepy senator-turned-actor as the GOP’s great white hope. Thompson “flopped like a fish.” Limbaugh, et al., then selected Mitt Romney as the true conservative in the race, and attacked candidate John McCain for his lack of conservative orthodoxy. Romney also flopped, while McCain won the nomination. The point of this history lesson: Their “spittle-flecked furor” may generate good ratings, but Beck, Limbaugh, and their legion of conservative talk-show colleagues do nothing to sway moderates and independents to vote for Republicans. In fact, “the rise of Beck, [Sean] Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and the rest has correlated almost perfectly with the decline of the GOP.”

What we Republicans need, said Steven Hayward in The Washington Post, are some new conservative intellectuals. In the glory days of the conservative movement, bona fide thinkers such as William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman, and Irving Kristol created the intellectual foundation on which the Reagan Revolution was based. Today, “we’ve traded Buckley for Beck, Kristol for [Ann] Coulter, and conservatism has been reduced to sound bites.” In the hands of these perpetually angry blowhards, said Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times, conservatism has turned into “a kind of fundamentalist religious movement.” To Limbaugh, Beck, and Coulter, liberals are not just wrong but evil, politics is “a jihad” to be fought to the death, and compromise or negotiation with Democrats is treason. In the face of such dogmatic fanaticism, mainstream Republicans and conservative intellectuals are “cowed,” which is why the party’s present—and future—is dim.

Oh, lighten up, said Jonah Goldberg in USA Today. Beck and Limbaugh aren’t apocalyptic evangelists; they’re entertainers—and judging by how they drive liberals and elitists up the wall, great ones, too. As for their alleged lack of intellectual rigor, any regular listener knows that they—and the Tea Party crowds they lead—“are indisputably libertarian.” Like Buckley and Friedman, the new populists champion individual liberty and decry the meddling of big government. Beck and Limbaugh have simply made this fundamentally conservative idea “less stuffy and more accessible.”

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And despite what Brooks thinks, they’re hardly without real political power, said Kenneth Tomlinson in The Washington Examiner. It was Beck who broke the news about the possibly criminal activities of Obama’s favorite advocacy group, ACORN. He also exposed the far-Left ranting of Van Jones, the president’s “green jobs” czar, forcing Jones to resign. What liberals and pointy-heads like Brooks don’t understand, said Erick-Woods Erickson, also in the Examiner, is that while Rush and Glenn and their fans may lack an Ivy League degree, they have an “instinctual” understanding that the country is headed in the wrong direction. “There is no greater conservative sentiment than “Stop!” When 2010 and 2012 come, and the Tea Party protesters march to the polls, we’ll see how powerless they really are.