RUSH LIMBAUGH IS THE LIBERALS' DILEMMA

WASHINGTON -- Liberals have discovered a new national problem: insufficient unanimity. In plainer language, Rush Limbaugh.

Rush is everywhere. Three hours a day on radio, a half-hour on TV. You can't ride to work or take your car in for repairs without hearing that distinctive Limbaugh sound. They play it in garages, taxis, offices. It's not one voice, but many like a lone musician playing a few notes on all the instruments of the orchestra in quick succession. He booms, whines, mutters, purrs, twitters. And every syllable is mockery of liberalism.

Liberals now control the White ~House, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, the major news media and the public education system. But, like Macbeth, they fear the worm that's fled. As long as there is one Rush Limbaugh, they won't feel safe.

And you know what? They're not paranoid. They rightly sense that the spell of propaganda is vulnerable to a single dart of satire. Rush has millions of people laughing at them. That's his lethal weapon.

"The satire here is not subtle," sniffs Walter Goodman, reviewing Rush's book, "The Way Things Ought to ~Be." (The book spent six months atop The New York Times best-seller list before the Times bothered assigning Mr. Goodman to evaluate it.)

Mr. Goodman is correct. ~Rush is not subtle. Neither was Juvenal, who noted that a certain Roman lady's aborted fetuses looked a lot like her uncle, and that surgeons snickered when they examined homosexuals' backsides. (A week of Juvenal, and liberals would be begging to have Limbaugh back.)

But in an hour of Limbaugh you get more common sense, not to mention humor, than in an average week of The New York Times. Just lately, he has asked more trenchant questions about Bill Clinton's budget figures than most of the "responsible" press has. More important, he has questioned the premise that "fairness" means robbing the rich.

Liberals are all for tolerance provided they can have a monopoly of opinion. They accuse Rush Limbaugh of being out of the mainstream, then fret because he's too popular! Lately he has come under attack in Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker and on "Nightline," all of which worry th~at Limbaugh-style talk radio poses a threat to democracy.

What really worries them is not some threat to democracy, but democracy itself. They like to do all the talking. Their motto is, "Don't call us, we'll call you."

Through the magic of "scientific" opinion polls, the major news media even report to us what we think! They simply phone a few hundred people, ask loaded questions that are obviously designed to elicit politically correct replies, then tell us the whole country agrees with the media consensus. With a 3.5 percent margin of error, of course. (Decimal points always add conviction.)

But talk-radio phone-in polls, dismissed as "unscientific," are a more authentic barometer of people's real feelings than polls that express the agenda of the political-media establishment. They let the listener take the initiative for a change.

The media as we have known them aren't designed for backtalk. They are a mode of mass production and amplification, as opposed to conversation. Like a gigantic megaphone, they enormously increase the advantage of the speaker over th~e auditor. There's no real conversation, no give and take; it's all one way, and any unwelcome feedback can be edited out.

Limbaugh himself is part of the media, but seems not to be. He impersonates the auditor, so to speak: He says everything the poor auditor has been dying to say all these years, but couldn't. What's more, he says it with terrific zest and irreverence.

But his real secret is that he gives oomph to critical reason. He is a very smart man who Mr. Goodman, take note knows how to make subtle points obvious and powerful. How else could he get ordinary people shouting about the federal budget?

The chief task of Bill Clinton's first four years will be to find a way to stifle Rush Limbaugh. If he fails, there won't be a second four years.