Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, who died Wednesday from lung cancer at the age of 70, was arguably the most important figure among American conservatives between Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump (who could rightly be said was never a true conservative but certainly had the following of millions of them).
His eponymous show had been nationally syndicated since 1988, the pre-internet years when most people got their news from the three broadcast networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, all of which leaned slightly left, and CNN, which also leaned left but was only in its first decade of existence, and from daily newspapers, which in the most of the nation’s big cities also leaned left.
Further, when Limbaugh’s show went national, Reagan was in his last year as president, but the country was in the middle of a period when Democrats ruled the United States Senate for 52 out of 62 years between 1933 and 1995 and the House for 58 out of 62 years over the same period.
Republicans and conservatives, despite their denizens being around half the country, had no national voice outside of a magazine or two with relatively little circulation and some newspaper editorial pages.
But Limbaugh, jovial and smart, was confident about going up against his outsized opposition. “I am equal time,” he assured listeners.