Is Rush Limbaugh destroying the GOP or the answer to its conservative prayers?

Conservative David Frum this morning on the downside of a decision to choose Rush Limbaugh as the Republican party's answer to President Barack Obama:

On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. ...

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. And we're cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush's every rancorous word - we'll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

Meanwhile, the intra party rift is growing as Limbaugh has fired back at RNC Chairman Michael Steele's dismissal of Limbaugh as someone who is an entertainer that gets paid to be incendiary.

Limbaugh, asked to respond, said he'd save his counter-attack for his listeners.

"I'll handle it on the radio," he wrote in an e-mail.

He did just that, lacing into Steele and saying the recently-elected party leader was "off to a shaky start."

"You know who needs a little leadership? Michael Steele and those at the RNC," Limbaugh said, part of an unusual counter-attack against the elected head of the GOP.

"I hope the RNC chairman will realize he's not a talking head pundit, that he is supposed to be working on the grassroots and rebuilding it and maybe doing something about our open primary system and fixing it so that Democrats don't nominate our candidates," Limbaugh said, his voice rising. "It's time, Mr. Steele, for you to go behind the scenes and start doing the work that you were elected to do instead of trying to be some talking head media star, which you're having a tough time pulling off."

The New Republic of all publications makes a partial defense of Limbaugh's recent statements that new ideas will not be the salvation for the beleaguered Republican Party.

Rush Limbaugh is drawing some ridicule for saying, "One thing we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat [the Democrats] is with better policy ideas." But I think he's basically right. Good ideas are meritorious. But being meritorious isn't what wins elections. Most voters have only the faintest idea what policy ideas candidates advocate when running or implement when in office. External conditions (such as the economy, but war and scandal matter also) have much more influence over which party wins. [...]

Limbaugh, then, is narrowly right. The GOP's fortunes are essentially an inverse function of the Obama administration's fortunes, which is turn depends almost entirely on the state of the world economy.

Where Limbaugh is wrong is that he thinks Americans inherently approve of the conservative agenda, and that Republican defeats can only be explained by deviation from the true faith. I think the public mostly disapproves of the right-wing agenda. If the economy is still terrible in 2012, Republicans will probably win, and if they do, they'll convince themselves they won because the public wants to cut taxes for the rich and privatize Social Security. They'll be wrong (see 2005)--but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

And libertarian hero and 2008 Republican presidential contender Ron Paul finds it pretty sad that Limbaugh is considered a GOP leader.

In a phone interview Monday morning with CNN's John Roberts, Paul said of Limbaugh "He is a leader. He does say the right things now and I think a lot of people like to hear what he's saying but I think it's also a little bit polarizing and confrontational and I think that's why the Democrats are bragging that Limbaugh now speaks for the Republicans so I guess the Democrats think its to their advantage if he