The Issue:

Rush Limbaugh is Barack Obama’s Greatest Asset

I have a friend who is a little different from my other friends. He is a White male Republican, nearly twice my age, born and raised in the state of Texas. People like him don’t usually like people like me, but I give everyone a chance when I meet them. It turns out that he is one of my most respected colleagues and a really good human being. My friend and I had lunch one day and he explained why he left the Republican Party, after 40 years of loyalty, in order to vote for Barack Obama.

My friend left the Republican party because he felt that the Republicans have, in the words of a famous comedian, “lost their damn minds”. In a changing world, they’ve become a sinking ship and a sick, dying dinosaur. Barack Obama’s brilliance as a presidential candidate not only defeated their raging empire, it smacked them to the fringes of our society. Bill O’Reilly is no longer the talk of the town and no one remembers what time to watch Sean Hannity’s show.

Rush Limbaugh has created an even greater opportunity for Barack Obama by alienating every fair-minded Republican in America. In that regard, he has become Barack’s greatest asset.

Rush Limbaugh doesn’t seem to care much about his party. He only seems to care about himself and the power of his platform. In a branch of Finance called “Agency Theory”, we would say that Rush has shown a tendency to put his own interests above those he claims to represent. He is similar to a point guard on a losing basketball team who only cares that he gets his 30 points every night. To further the sports analogy, Rush used to be a playmaker, but he is now a deal breaker. The problem is that many Republicans are afraid to do anything about it.

The Republican party can only blame themselves for the “Limbaugh problem”. Living by the sword means that you should expect to eventually get stabbed. The Republicans were more than happy, during the age of Bush, to ride the wave of neo-conservative talk show hosts, who carefully laid the party’s agenda out on national television and radio each week. As Hitler did during the Nazi regime, they armed the masses with sufficient propaganda to win every water cooler argument in the country. This strategy worked when the world was caught up in the “Axis of Evil”, the “War on Terror” and “Stopping Saddam Hussein from getting Nuc-you-lur weapons”. But it doesn’t work anymore.

The world has changed. The “Axis of Evil” became the “Axis of Ignorance”. The economy is in the same shape as MC Hammer’s bank account. People have gotten sick of Bush and are tired of being hated by the world. Senator Arlen Specter has defected, and we all watched as the party allowed Limbaugh to publicly pimp slap Chairman Michael Steele, who (by Republican standards) was actually trying to modernize the party and reconnect it to mainstream America.

Rush Limbaugh finds himself being the last hold out on the political Titanic. He has been called out by fair-minded Republicans, such as Colin Powell, but he doesn’t care. After hearing Powell’s critique of Limbaugh’s irrational behavior, Rush simply told Powell that he should become a Democrat. Even former Vice President Dick Cheney has shown his stubborn side, stating that, “My take on Colin Powell is that he had already left the party.” So, rather than accepting the fact that the Republicans have become political dinosaurs, the most stubborn among them have chosen to simply dig in their heels. Rush has stated openly that he wants the president to fail, which means that he wants America to fail. As much as I found myself irritated by George W. Bush, I never wanted him to fail.

The truth is that Colin Powell is proving that individuals like Limbaugh and Cheney do not have a monopoly on conservative values in America. In fact, I dare to argue that if the Republican Party had been flexible enough to adjust its racially biased views on crime, economics and education, they would have quite a few Black votes. If anyone thinks African Americans are natural liberals, you’ve obviously never been to a Black church (I know quite a few African Americans who supported Bush in 2004 due to their Southern Baptist backgrounds. Most of them switched to Obama in 2008). My many awkward, yet respectful, conversations with the Reverend Jesse Jackson remind me that Black religious leaders have value systems that have as much in common with conservative Republicans as liberal Democrats(Jesse Jackson is one of my favorite people, by the way, and I stand by my defense of Rev. Jackson during the unfortunate Fox News/Barack Obama incident. I’ve never believed that one bad sound bite should destroy 40 years of hard work).

So, Barack Obama is quite fortunate. He is dealing with a political party who has allowed its ship to be steered by the angry, uneducated blind man with a ridiculously massive ego. The Republican Party, under the guide of Limbaugh, has become The Taliban of Capitol Hill. Most Americans want no part of a group which appears to be fighting for America’s demise. If the Republicans want to win elections in the future, they’ve got to remember who they represent. Limbaugh only seems to represent himself.

—www.blackvoices.com, Dr. Boyce Watkins is a Finance Professor at Syracuse University and author of “What if George Bush were a Black Man?”