Right-wing radio hosts bracing for Barack Obama victory
By DAVID HINCKLEY
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Thursday, October 30th 2008, 4:31 PM
With the presidential election days away, the talking heads of right-wing talk radio are mood-swinging between anxiety over a potential winner they despise and hope that the polls and pundits have got it wrong.
But the enthusiasm gap for John McCain afflicts some of the hosts as well.
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Michael Savage, heard nightly on WOR (710 AM), announced Wednesday night that he was endorsing McCain, "even though he’s almost as bad as [GEORGE W.]Bush," because "we can’t afford to elect a radical Marxist like Barack Hussein Obama."
His sense of obligation won out, Savage proclaimed dramatically: "My endorsement could change the election and help save America."
Savage also has offered a few ideas that could expedite that process. "People on welfare shouldn’t be allowed to vote," he said. "They’ll only vote themselves a raise."
That’s Savage being Savage. But at the same hour on WABC (770 AM), host Mark Levin bemoaned the potential election of a "socialist" who would "take away our freedoms" and end America as we know it.
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"Sometimes I feel like I’m talking to myself," said Levin, who has also ripped McCain, but endorsed him after the Sarah Palin selection. "We need to do something."
Earlier on WABC, Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) warned Sean Hannity ominously that a President Obama "would knock guys like you off the air."
Hannity himself has been repeatedly charged that we don’t know if Obama was really born in Hawaii and thus is really a citizen.
That hosts like Hannity give voice to some of the wilder Internet-fed rumors offends at least one local program director, Rennie Bishop of WWRL (1600 AM), the local outlet of the liberal Air America network.
"Talk radio now isn’t about issues, it’s about flame-throwing," says Bishop. "They’re just throwing anything out, no matter how pointless or baseless, to see if it will stick."
Talk radio – or at least the 90% that sees itself as a proud outpost of traditional American values on a hostile liberal mediascape – has seen the McCain campaign as catch-up from the start.
But veteran Republican cheerleaders like Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are not going to throw in the towel in the closing days. Each day they cherry-pick the polls, or parts of polls, that can support the argument that the race is close and McCain can pull it out.
And if not?
Paul Waldron of Media Matters, a progressive media watchdog group, says that while "there’s still a lot of ugliness toward Obama on talk radio, all the coded messages that he somehow isn’t ‘one of us,’ " some anger is a also being directed back at McCain.
"They need someone to blame," he says. "The liberal media. McCain himself. It’s almost like, if McCain loses, they want to have been out there with a pre-emptive explanation that exonerates the hosts by putting the responsibility somewhere else."
Whatever happens to McCain, conservative talk radio will still be there -- and if Obama wins, it could be stronger than ever, with its best villain since Bill Clinton was in the White House.
"If talk radio hosts were going to vote purely for their own self-interest instead of what they consider best for America, they’d all pull the lever for Obama," jokes Tim Graham, director of media analysis for the conservative-leaning Media Research Center.
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