No, Rush isn't the leader of the GOP. Which is too bad.

I was given a glimpse of the vision folks in the entertainment world have conjured—senators, congressmen, and Republican operatives sitting eagerly by their radios, pad and pencil in hand, as Rush dictates their next steps in global domination. I’m not sure folks in Hollywood believed me—in fact, I caught more than one polite but skeptical glance—when I told them that that’s not how things actually worked.

When I was a congressional aide, most members of the House and Senate were usually too busy passing money for bridges to nowhere to pay much heed to talk-show hosts. Sure, every once in a while, constituents would call about something they heard on Rush Limbaugh or Laura Ingraham. Members of Congress scrambled to mollify them—by holding a hearing or issuing a press release—so they could go back to the far more important work of having taxpayer-subsidized chauffeurs take them to gas stations in their SUVs to complain about global warming. Time and again during the Bush administration, folks on talk radio warned the White House and Congress about grassroots discontent over a divisive immigration bill, would-be Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, and the administration’s spending sprees. GOP leaders didn’t listen. They should have. Conservatives abandoned the party in droves. (Of course, there are limits to talk radio’s influence on the grassroots. Just last year, Rush advised listeners that John McCain would be a disaster for the Republican Party if he was the nominee. He came just short of endorsing practically anyone else—Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, none of the above. Listeners decided differently. That didn’t mean Rush was wrong.