Changing Political Tide Challenges Talk Radio Conservative Hosts Wrestle With Playing Defense Instead Of Offense

For the country’s talk radio hosts, about 70 percent of whom call themselves conservative, the first signs of a bear market are starting to emerge.

Gone is Joycelyn Elders, the surgeon general labeled “the condom queen” by many a drive-time talk jock. Ditto Tom Foley and Dan Rostenkowski, the term-limits poster boys of the old Democratic Congress.

And President Clinton, who has been more vilified than anyone on the talk radio demonology list, is pushing tax cuts, of all things. Some hosts are even ignoring Clinton, saying he is too easy a target.

In the absence of hot talk favorites like gays in the military and federally subsidized midnight basketball, some radio listeners during the holidays focused on incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia and his $4.5 million book deal, creating a negative buzz that may have contributed to Gingrich’s decision this week to forgo the advance on the book contract.

“He’s selling out the new Congress,” one talk show caller in Seattle said in a typical comment.

While experts disagree on whether there is a direct relationship between the hammering Democrats took on the air and the knockout they received on Election Day, many of the winners have few doubts. The Republican freshman class has made Rush Limbaugh, the godfather of conservative gab, an honorary member.

Around the country, radio hosts brag of their new status as political power brokers, and many are planning to go to Washington in January to cover the opening days of the new Congress, tenuous partners to the politicians they helped create.

But all of that raises a big question for the talkmeisters: Can those who have been promoters for the Republican agenda still flourish in a medium whose oxygen is outrage?

Some hosts say they may have to sink or swim with the new Congress, attacking opponents of the Republican legislative program from their makeshift radio booths in the capitol.

Others say their strategy as insiders will be to act as watchdogs, “holding their feet to the fire,” as Roger Hedgecock, a conservative host at KSDO-AM in San Diego, has said.

Mike Fitzsimmons, another conservative host, said, “I’m already spending a lot of time now playing defense.” He is a host on KXLYAM in Spokane, where one of this year’s bloodiest battles between radio and a politician took place.

It was in Spokane that Foley, the former speaker of the House who lost his House seat in November, took round-the-clock hits from three radio stations, including two whose hosts also led rallies against him. Late in the campaign, a frustrated Foley ventured into the lair of one of his harshest critics, Richard Clear of KGA-AM.

On the air, Clear asked Foley, married to the same woman for 24 years, if he was a homosexual, something the host had picked up from one of the anti-Clinton broadsides faxed to hundreds of talk shows every week. The question caused other hosts to take issue with the direction of talk radio.

“The mean-spiritedness, the desire to create an us-vs.-them, that bothers me,” Fitzsimmons said.

Since the election, one of Spokane’s biggest radio draws is a free-form debate on KXLY between a liberal and a conservative, a format that is becoming more popular nationwide. And the city’s listeners are also receiving, out of Los Angeles, the syndicated show of Tom Leykis, who calls himself “the only talk radio host who is not a right-wing wacko or a convicted felon.”

Non-conservatives - some of whom dare to call themselves liberals - are building on their new outsider status. In Detroit, there is a once-aweek duel on the most powerful radio station, WJR-AM, between Kevin Joyce, a conservative, and Geoffrey N. Fieger, a lawyer who represents Dr. Jack Kevorkian and who calls himself “a toxic liberal.”

Asked why he thought the Republican Party had so dominated talk radio, Fieger, warming to his new medium, said it was because “most liberals are mealy-mouthed wimps.”

Joyce is a longtime conservative talk show host who said he is starting to ease up on Clinton. “Everyone is bashing him,” he said. “It’s way too easy.”

Clinton-bashing has lost some of its currency, several other leading conservative hosts said, if only because the president is seen as weak, almost irrelevant.

“Nationally syndicated talk show hosts have their work cut out for them, especially the ones that have made their living out of beating up on Bill Clinton,” said J.R. Gach, a highrated conservative host on WWLAM in New Orleans.

Other topics, from changing the tax structure (the flat tax is a big issue) to tearing down the federal bureaucracy, are showing up on talk radar.

In general, though, most talk radio focuses on the news-generating sources of power; for now, that means the Republican Party. And many talk hosts said their listeners tend not to have strong party loyalty, which might make things difficult for hosts who made their reputations as Republican promoters.

A recent sampling of listeners found Bill from a car phone in Buffalo, N.Y., wanting to know about Gingrich and his college-day drug experience. Seth, a first-time caller from Idaho, said the Republican Party was going to renege on its promise to enact term limits.

“Listeners are saying, ‘Now that our guys are in power, you guys better behave or you are going out, too,”’ said Kevin Culhane, acting station manager of KNUS in Denver.