Limbaugh fans are part the problem -- Larison

I haven't listened to Rush in a long time, because I can't at work. But he doesn't argue Republicans need to be hard-core conservatives. Whoever says that has the argument backwards. What Rush has said, many times, is that America is a conservative nation, and if Republicans act like conservatives, they can win. If you look at the rhetoric of Democrat politicians versus Republicans, it is obvious this is true. Why is Obama pushing a tax cut as one of his major ideas? Why is he talking about attacking Pakistan and surging in Afghanistan? (Put aside the foreign policy debate on the right. Obama definitely does NOT articulate a liberal position.) Self identification by voters also indicates a conservative plurality.

I couldn't even believe Bush won in 2004, all he did was say mindless conservative slogans. In order for that to be possible, the nation must at least have a conservative bias. Liberals like to focus on "extreme" conservative positions, but the conservative bias is at the fundamental level, with basic questions such as, "If a person works hard, they will succeed in America". Or with the bailout, conservatives say people who have done nothing wrong shouldn't be forced to pay for other people's mistakes. Liberals (and McCain! and Bush!) want to send money to stupid bankers and stupid borrowers.

Maybe I have the wrong perception of the general population, but in my opinion, if McCain were an actual conservative and attacked Bush & Congress for the bailout, he would be up 2-3 percent and would be on the way to victory.

"That is interesting. I tend think that he is skewering assumptions conservatives have about how left-wing people think, assumptions that were true decades ago, but not so much now. So, whenever I listen to Savage, Rush, or Coulter, its like they are fiercely attacking strawmen from another era."

Rush and Savage have very little in common. If you want to talk about strawmen, lumping those two together would be a good example.

And Rush isn't skewering Walter Cronkite here. He's talking about today's media and today's politicians. Naturally his assumptions about how left-wingers think are his own conclusions and not some objective standard that all have to agree with, but he is not short of evidence provided by liberal public figures almost daily.

I think Larison is onto something, but he overstates it.

Rush is popular not just because of his ideas but also because he's enormously talented at what he does. No one else is in his league. And because of his success, he has brough many imitators in his wake, who share many of his listeners: Hannity, Ingraham, Levin, et al. Collectively, they wield a mighty, perhaps the mightiest, bullhorn on the right.

And they ain't going away.

Let us grant that Rush and company are too apt to take inadequate stock of how the country has changed, or overlook where the Bush Administration screwed up beyond the obvious heterodoxies of amnesty, overspending, etc. But given that Rush and Sean and company have large numbers of listeners on the right - maybe it's not 20 million, but it's a lot - any attempt to rebuild the conservative movement in the short term is going to find it much harder going to work against talk radio rather than with it. Maybe it would be better to get Ross Douthat to guest on Rush or Laura rather than beating up on them, start to plant the seeds of some fresh thinking.

Otherwise, the conservative movement is going to have a long period in the political wilderness to deal with.