White America a minority-to-be

EVERY so often in the US there is another little demographic news flash that shakes the foundation of the American heartland anew.

Across the airwaves yesterday was a report that by 2023, minorities in the US - non-whites, but meaning mostly Hispanics - will make up the majority of all children in the country. That means white children born in the US today will be in the minority of all children in the US before they even finish high school.

This coming minority status is accelerating: 2023 is seven years earlier than predicted five years ago. Birth rates among the mostly Catholic Hispanic population run at a much faster clip.

And it means whites in the US - adults and children - are due to become the minority in just 30 years. Which brings us to Rush Limbaugh.

The king of American shock jocks will reach an audience of about 20 million people a week and his bombastic, fly-the-flag and snappy oratory taps into something that many conservative whites - the base of the Republican Party - are feeling over the demographic changes to their country: that the America they know is slipping away.

These views inform plenty of the debate in the US over things such as immigration, particularly illegal immigration, which incenses millions of Americans, because any child born in the US of illegal immigrants automatically wins citizenship.

Thanks to Australia being an island nation, our debates on immigration can take place in more measured tones than in the US. Its 3000km border with Mexico admits an estimated 1000 illegal immigrants a day, to say nothing of the increasingly violent drug trade.

Limbaugh, who vehemently opposed former president George W. Bush's attempts at immigration reform that would have legalised the more than 11 million illegal immigrants in the country, voices the frustration and anger many feel over this and other hot-button issues, such as gun control and federal government spending.

Last weekend, Limbaugh addressed an overwhelmingly white audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference and spoke for 90 minutes without, he pointedly reminded his cheering supporters, a teleprompter - a reference to President Barack Obama's constant use of the speaking aid.

"I want the country to survive as we have known it - as you and I were raised in it, is what I mean," Limbaugh said.

He says his politics is colourblind, and indeed this kind of nostalgia is demographic rather than ideological - Hispanics made up just 1 per cent of the population in the US in 1950.

This is at the heart of the Republicans' present problem. Many wise heads are urging for a more inclusive, even moderate platform to emerge from the ashes of their defeat, not only to Obama last November, but in the mid-term congressional elections in 2006.

The Hispanic demographic was not lost on Bush, nor his political strategist Karl Rove - hence

the push on immigration reform.

But last weekend the Republican Party elevated Limbaugh - dressed like Johnny Cash, his black shirt unbuttoned to his chest - in a national address that Democrats are already using in television advertising.

For while there are millions of people who love Limbaugh, many more hate his daily diatribes against Democrats and the "drive-by" media - which he says are the mostly liberal media outlets that quell debate and shoot down conservative talk in the country.

The Obama White House has played Limbaugh up, which the radio host relishes because it does his ratings no harm. Last weekend, Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel called him "the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party".

So, this week, speaking like the head of the party, Limbaugh challenged Obama to a debate on his show.

The cooler heads in the Republican Party despair at the spectacle, which this week also included the (black) Republican Party chairman Michael Steele apologising to Limbaugh for having called his radio show "ugly" and "incendiary".

David Frum, the Bush speechwriter who coined the phrase "axis of evil", bewails Limbaugh's status as party icon and the hay the Democrats will make out of his latest appearance.

"On the one side, the President of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims," Frum wrote this week on his blog.

"And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as 'losers'.

"With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence - exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party ...

"The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant.

"The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined."

Limbaugh was to Republicanism in the 2000s what black activist Jesse Jackson was to the Democratic Party in the 1980s, Frum says.

"He plays an important role in our coalition, and of course he and his supporters have to be treated with respect. But he cannot be allowed to be the public face of the enterprise - and we have to find ways of assuring the public that he is just one Republican voice among many, and very far from the most important."