COLUMN ONE : Rush and GOP Elite: Getting Too Cozy? : Some ‘ditto head’ devotees worry that Limbaugh has joined the conservative establishment. He now wields more influence in corridors of power. But his ratings are starting to dip.

At Tampa’s WFLA radio station, program manager Gabe Hobbs began to worry recently about Rush Limbaugh. During the spring and summer, Limbaugh’s ratings had dropped, and fans were complaining that the big man was becoming “repetitive” or “predictable.”

Even the head of one fan club had admitted to Hobbs that he had started skipping some of Limbaugh’s show in favor of the O.J. Simpson trial.

“You hear that, you start to worry, “ Hobbs said, adding hurriedly that he never worried enough to consider replacing the three-hour show. “Rush remains a big star even if his numbers have dropped slightly.”

Indeed, Limbaugh’s radio audience is still massive--more than 20 million listeners each week on more than 650 stations. And his television show, while it has suffered a dip in ratings, continues to lure thousands of fans to “Rush rooms” in bars, airports and restaurants around the country, where they gather to watch him dispense his views.

Still, there is a faint whiff of trouble in Limbaugh’s formidable kingdom, and at least some fans and fellow radio hosts say they discern a reason: Limbaugh has changed.

The daily show has fewer biting political jokes and thundering diatribes, complain some of his followers. There are more lectures, analyses. And even though there is still the occasional Rush lyric--satirical songs about President Clinton remain a staple--the tone is softer, as some friends see it.

In his highest dudgeon, Limbaugh now often sounds like a congressman expressing official outrage on the floor of the House of Representatives. In sum, he is now a member of the conservative political establishment.

“When Rush started on the air, he was the voice of rebel conservatism,” says Randall Bloomquist, news/talk editor at Radio & Records newspaper. “He was ranting against the Congress and those dopey liberals. Now he’s come down out of the mountains, and he’s part of the conservative provisional government.

“He’s having to defend people in government instead of always being on the attack. That’s a very different game,” Bloomquist says.

This change brings a trade-off: In his new mode as interpreter and cheerleader for the Republican majority, Limbaugh has vastly more influence than ever in the corridors of power. Indeed, some Republican strategists believe that if he were to endorse a candidate in the GOP presidential sweepstakes--a step that he has carefully avoided--he could bring along a solid army of conservative supporters. On the other hand, AM radio is now the favored medium of the nation’s insurgents, a noisy group of talk show hosts that thrives on rejecting the establishment--even a conservative one.

Limbaugh’s radio ratings are hard to quantify but program managers in some areas of the country have begun complaining about a slight dip in numbers. His television show also is down slightly from its 1994 perch, when Nielsen ratings ranked it eighth of 15 syndicated talk shows, with an average of 4.06 million viewers. This year’s numbers put Limbaugh ninth among 25 syndicated shows, with about 2.9 million viewers.

‘Part of Power Elite’

The numbers have prompted a few key stations, including KCAL in Los Angeles, to move the show to a less desirable time slot or to drop it altogether. KCAL moved him from 6:30 p.m. to 1 a.m.

When John Suter, general manager of KWGN-TV in Denver, canceled Limbaugh’s television program in September, the station’s switchboard was jammed with calls from angry viewers.

“Boy, were his fans cranky about it,” Suter said recently. “I got yelled at and called a Communist, and I said, ‘Hey, I’m the same guy who put it on the air in the first place, and I was a great guy back then, remember?’ If the show had worked, I told them, he would still be on the air.” Limbaugh’s show was picked up by a Denver public television station, Channel 12, which runs it at 10:30 p.m.

Those changes could be an early indication of trouble. “If you make too much money, get too much power, that chokes you a little bit on talk radio,” says Dee Fine, a Birmingham, Ala., talk show host who sees herself as a beneficiary of the Limbaugh phenomenon. Limbaugh is “part of the establishment now.”

“We have callers who feel Rush is abandoning them,” agrees Russell Fine, Dee’s husband and radio partner. “These callers are saying that this is not the same old Rush. He’s part of the power elite now.”

One reason for this distance between Rush and the little man on the other end of the radio may be that Limbaugh makes about $25 million a year. Besides his broadcasts, Limbaugh peddles books, a newsletter and a complete line of Rush Limbaugh megawatt ties.

Limbaugh, who likes to belittle the “liberal media” and routinely avoids face-to-face talks with reporters, declined to be interviewed for this story. But in a recent exchange with radio hosts on WABC in Manhattan, he seemed to be explaining his new status at the same time he was chiding some fellow broadcast personalities for their behavior.

“If you do start having influence,” he said, “then the need for a conscious responsibility for what you say is critical. Some have bought into the idea that you only need to be outrageous [to succeed on the air], and that is not good.”

There is plenty of evidence that Limbaugh moves easily now in Washington’s inner circles. One day last month, listeners heard him call House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s office to pass along a compliment from a caller to “Mr. Newt,” as Limbaugh calls him. As Limbaugh chatted with a staff member, he could be heard trying to stop the aide from interrupting the speaker. “Oh, no, don’t get him out of a meeting,” Limbaugh cooed. “Just tell him next time you see him.”

On another recent show, he recommended “The Moral Compass,” a new book by former Education Secretary William J. Bennett, as a Christmas present. He added, “I’ve got my own personalized autographed copy of it, ladies and gentlemen.”

Limbaugh and Bennett are known to be friends. Last year Limbaugh was at a small Washington dinner party at which Bennett mulled over the pros and cons of running for president. (He eventually decided against it).

Defense of Politics

More publicly, after the Republicans won a majority in Congress last year, Republican freshmen called Limbaugh a “majority maker” and made him an honorary member of the “Limbaugh Congress.”

By contrast with Limbaugh, some talk show hosts--in styles that range from provocative to abusive--see any government, even a conservative Congress, as the adversary. One talk show host has wished for Clinton’s death. Others have allowed callers to rant against blacks and Jews, airing some of the country’s more extreme conspiracy theories.

Limbaugh now often ridicules the ultra-outsiders, as he did recently with a feature he labeled the “Kook SATs” that mocked some of the most long-standing shibboleths of the far right. (“If Trilateralist A traveled east at 30 miles an hour and Trilateralist B traveled west at 50 miles an hour, how long would it take them to take over the Federal Reserve?” went one entry in the test, poking fun at those who believe a Trilateral Commission is a secret seat of world power.)

Of course, Limbaugh has not suddenly become the Mr. Rogers of talk radio. Only a few weeks ago, he compared the media tactics of Clinton’s chief of staff to the efforts of Hitler’s propagandist, Joseph Goebbels. But such language is rare. More often, Limbaugh instructs and guides his listeners into the Republican establishment camp, educating them to the new realities of congressional power. To one recent caller who sneered at the Washington insiders making deals on the budget, and particularly at Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), Limbaugh launched into a rousing defense of career politics.

“Washington politics is a career,” he boomed into his powerful microphone. “Somebody who’s never done it before is not going to excel or succeed.

“I don’t understand this hatred some of you have for Bob Dole,” he went on to add a few minutes later, criticizing those who feel Dole represents the old ways of Washington when he tries to push a deal on the federal budget.

“Listen, politics is deal-making. There is going to be a deal struck on the budget,” he said. “Getting deal-making out of politics is like saying that you have to take the pop out of popcorn.”

Rise to Fame

The microphone that gives Limbaugh his political clout may also define his identity. Bloomquist recalls a story he did about him for the Washington Times several years ago. The interview started at the studio and continued over lunch at a nearby restaurant. “It was almost as if every step away from the studio, he grew smaller and less confident, shrinking with each step into the real-life Rush Limbaugh.”

In real life, Limbaugh can be polite and gentle, his friends say. He also can be socially clumsy or out of sync, as he was last month at a speech in Washington. Addressing fans who had paid $125 each to see him, he had called his wife onstage to introduce her. Then, as he became absorbed in his talk, he apparently forgot she was there.

As he raged about the Democrats, pounding every word out to his loyal audience, Limbaugh’s wife could be seen cowering behind his back, hiding from the very limelight that seemed to be nourishing her husband.

“Rush,” someone yelled finally from a nearby table. “Your wife.”

Limbaugh stopped in mid-simile. He turned and pulled Marta gently to his side and then, as the audience applauded, she scurried to her seat. A few days later, he publicly apologized to her on air.

The portly 44-year-old man who has become a “living legend,” as he sometimes reminds his listeners with a chuckle, grew up in tiny Cape Girardeau, Mo. His mother once said that little Rusty “didn’t start talking until he was 2, and then he didn’t stop.” His father was a Goldwater Republican, a prominent attorney in town who wanted his son to become a lawyer.

Instead, Limbaugh dropped out of college after a year (flunking Speech 101, he likes to say now). After realizing that his social awkwardness disappeared in the cocoon of a radio studio, he decided to try radio full time. The Limbaugh launch was a bust: He was fired from two radio jobs and suffered a detour on his rise to fame when he worked, briefly, as a member of the marketing department of the Kansas City Royals.

But in 1984, when Morton Downey Jr. was ousted for making a racist joke, Limbaugh replaced him at KFBK in Sacramento, where he made waves and big ratings. Four years later, he was broadcasting nationwide from WABC in Manhattan, a phenomenon who spoke for a large sector of America that felt unnoticed and silenced before Rush came on the scene.

“People felt isolated from everything they heard coming out of Washington--the literature, the media,” says Rep. Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho). Limbaugh, she says, gained popularity by addressing that isolation.

Now the combination of that loyal audience and Limbaugh’s praise of the GOP leadership has made him irresistible to candidates peddling an idea or running for office. A plea from Limbaugh can send fans to the phones--clogging the switchboards at news organizations, companies or the Congress. More than one “ditto head,” as fans call themselves, have promised to vote for anybody Rush admires.

Republican candidates “would walk through walls for him,” says Mary Matalin, a longtime Limbaugh friend and co-host of CNBC’s “Equal Time” cable TV talk show. “I know that, because I know how many requests come through me for him--to do endorsements, fund-raisers, ‘Just say something nice about us.’ They all want to get through to him. They all want to know how to get him to say nice things about their campaigns.”

As Republican political strategist Eddie Mahe puts it: “Limbaugh on any given day will have significantly more influence than any of the networks. The audience is huge, and they are paying attention.”

Dole, for example, has been in touch by phone several times in recent months. Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) has been by to see Limbaugh on several occasions. Other candidates call, fax (300 arrive each day), send notes and try the Matalin route.

An Asset to GOP

For the party, Limbaugh provides a tremendous asset. “What Limbaugh has really done is that he has opened the closed world of congressional debate,” says William Kristol, editor and publisher of the Weekly Standard, a new conservative magazine. Limbaugh’s strength, he said, is that when Congress is locked in serious debate--about the budget, about Bosnia, about Gingrich--Limbaugh “can instantly get certain facts and a certain point of view out to millions of listeners and viewers.”

Or, as Dole’s press secretary Nelson Warfield puts it, Limbaugh serves as “the telegraph line of the conservative movement.”

But in these days of anti-establishment fervor, particularly on the air, being a telegraph for a movement may no longer be a recipe for success.

“The life cycle of this kind of political commentary is that you begin as an outsider--saying things that no one else will say--building up a large enough following that you have to be reckoned with,” says Neal Gabler, author of a recent biography of Walter Winchell, the celebrity columnist and radio commentator from the Depression era to the 1950s.

Like Limbaugh, Winchell came from the outside, gathered a huge audience and then became a power within the political system, Gabler notes. “Then you are courted by insiders and you become a power-broker and you begin to perceive yourself as a power-broker.”

As a result, the old audience slowly begins to feel disconnected and starts to slip away.

“It is very, very difficult to stay an outsider once you’re powerful and popular,” Gabler says. “It’s almost an oxymoron.”