It is unlikely that anyone given access to Limbaugh's inner circle would step back to put the draft/Vietnam issue into larger perspective as other writers have done. Army of One devotes little ink to the notion that someone who avoided the war of his time might consider being less warlike in his rhetoric.
Moving on--G. H. W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton; the Clinton years came and went--with Limbaugh much in evidence when the GOP took over Congress in 1994, and in the Monica Lewinsky saga from 1998--and another Bush came to the White House.
But Limbaugh, by that time in his political element, had some private crises to address, as indicated above: after the Enquirer revelations, "Rush was busted, pure and simple, and he had nowhere to hide. On October 10, 2003, he went on air and tried to explain what had happened to his audience." (95) "On November 18, Rush returned to the air" after rehab, and admitted having abused prescription drugs since 1996 or 1995--"whatever, to just five weeks ago," the author quotes him as saying.
Bill O'Reilly: "Ted Baxter"
The second half of the book has its bits. On page 124, the author quotes Limbaugh as saying that he never has listened to either Don Imus or Laura Ingraham. Bill O'Reilly? Limbaugh calls him "Ted Baxter. Sorry, but somebody's got to say it."
Little in the book about Limbaugh's role in any election will surprise political junkies. The discussion of Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" in Chapter 8, however, does usefully reveal Limbaugh to be no political wizard. Limbaugh tried "Operation Chaos"--gigging his audience on to vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries--because he simply assumed, prima facie, that prolonging the primary season would hurt the Democrats. In this assumption, he was in sync with a near-total consensus; Chafets quotes both David Plouffe and Karl Rove on the same point, making the same assumption.
Exactly how much Limbaugh affected the Democratic primary season is open to question. But hindsight and the passage of time have by now clarified one unintended effect. One thing the lengthy primary race did was to reinforce the "50-state strategy" initially proposed by Gov. Howard Dean: the more the primary candidates had to battle it out on the national stage, the more political venues they had to reach.
The over-all result was pretty much exactly the opposite of Sen. Hillary Clinton's famous "It'll be over by Feb. 5." (A YouTube moment)
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