The Rush is on.

I've been listening to Rush Limbaugh. "I'm fed up with the exaggerations and lies from the Administration about their achievements," he ranted one day. Why, he demanded, did the press and the pundits fall all over themselves praising the civility" of the Presidential debates as if politeness is more important than getting at the issues?

Amen," I think. Oops.

I am agreeing with Limbaugh, who has spent an hour trashing the "mainstream media," "Dan Blather," and "the Schlickmeister," a.k.a. Clinton. He also fulminated against the FBI's mishandling of the Richard Jewell case, and suggested that Jewell sue the president of Piedmont College--that member of the "arts-and-croissants, wine-and-brie crowd"--for warning the FBI that Jewell was an overzealous security guard.

Limbaugh was trying to keep his conservative listeners pumped up in the face of a Republican candidate whose impromptu, seemingly involuntary blurtings about "waking up," while shunning all newspapers, suggested a new level of desperation. But Limbaugh was also trying to remain relevant during a campaign in which talk radio, after Tour years of exerting considerable political pressure, seems to be losing steam.

Why am I torturing myself by listening to the man Al Franken calls a "cholesterol colony" and "suet boy"? After all, polls show that regular listenership to political talk radio has declined in the past six months, to about 13 percent of the population. Although talk radio played a central role in both the 1992 and 1994 elections--90 percent of those who listened regularly to Limbaugh voted in 1994--bath Clinton and Dole ignored the format this time around. Is Limbaugh passe?

Precisely because the press paid so little attention to talk radio during the recent campaign, I thought I'd tune in to hear the voice that reportedly draws in twenty million listeners each week. And I've got bad news. Not only does Limbaugh remain brilliant at reframing current events to fit a conservative agenda, he also provides an echo chamber for stories with a conservative bias, repeating and amplifying conservative op-ed pieces (William Safire seems to be his latest favorite source), and dragging stories buried on page twenty-seven into the light of day.

I'm not really eager to praise a man who once said, "Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society," and, "We're in bad shape in this country when you can't look at a couple of huge knockers and notice them."

But I think that as we on the left try to re-imagine what the role of the press--and the left--should be in the age of soundbite journalism and mega-media mergers, we would do well to stand back from Limbaugh's rightwing rhetoric and consider the shrewdness of his approach.

Limbaugh satisfies needs and anxieties in his audience that the left has long recognized, but hasn't addressed very well. These are, in particular, a concern about the collapse of public life in America, cynicism about politics, and a growing concern that the news media are simply not serving the public well at all.

More than half of those who tune in to shows like Limbaugh's say they do so because talk radio "is a good place to learn things that cannot be learned elsewhere." Studies show that talk radio makes listeners more avid consumers of domestic news. While voters studied by Diana Carlin at the University of Kansas showed widespread dissatisfaction with a "media that lets the candidates get away with soundbite cliches," talk-radio listeners are even more fed up with the network news.

What does Limbaugh offer listeners? By labeling his show the "Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies," Limbaugh provides an on-air political elderhostel for those long out of the classroom who want and need guidance in a media-saturated, spin-governed world. Limbaugh reads to his audience from The New York Times and The Washington Post, quotes from the network news, and juxtaposes these excerpts with hot-off-the-press faxes that he receives from "inside," conservative sources who have the "real" truth. Think Utne Reader for the right, broadcast on 660 stations.

He takes the most obscure, complicated stories and makes sense out of them, and he flatters his audience: You, too, can understand a scandal The New York Times pretends is too complex and remote for the likes of you.

Limbaugh is also a male hysteric, his voice moving down and up from somber bass to giddy, disbelieving laugh as he expresses outrage not permitted Peter Jennings. He embodies a rejection of the bankruptcy and hypocrisy of a journalistic "objectivity" that seems to benefit those in power and hardly anyone else.

At least a week before John Huang, former head of the Lippo Group in the United States and executive for the suddenly newsworthy Riadys of Indonesia, became front-page news, Rush was bashing away at Huang's questionable fundraising work for the Democratic National Committee.

Cribbing the headline from William Safire's op-ed piece "Lippo Suction," Limbaugh translated Safire's somewhat convoluted piece for his devoted dittoheads: Huang is a crook, he traded Indonesian money for political influence inside the Clinton Administration, his fundraising techniques were illegal, and Clinton was his best friend. Simple.

Anticipating a second term for Clinton, Limbaugh and Safire were not shy about using the word "impeachment." Limbaugh's star may be falling--we'll see--but in this current season of journalistic "civility," he is, in fact, one of the few people on the air talking about issues in a highly accessible, if reactionary, way. He has effectively stolen his critique of the press and his emphasis on "behind-the-scenes" information from a long tradition of progressive journalism. It's time to steal these back.

Susan Douglas teaches at the University of Michigan. Her column appears in this space every month.