It's official: Americans admire Glenn Beck more than they admire the pope.
This news, at once unsettling and unsurprising, came from the Gallup polling organization on Wednesday. Beck, the new Fox News host who has said President Obama has a "deep-seated hatred for white people" and alternately likens administration officials to Nazis and Marxists, was also more admired by Americans than Billy Graham and Bill Gates, not to mention Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. In Americans' esteem, Beck only narrowly trailed South Africa's Nelson Mandela, the man who defeated apartheid.
The 45-year-old recovering alcoholic and Mormon convert has become the first true demagogue of the information age. His nightly diet of falsehoods and conspiracies on Fox, and his daily outrages on the radio, have propelled his popularity past even Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. His method is simple: He goes places where others are forbidden by conscience.
Death panels? Government health insurance for dogs? FEMA concentration camps? An Obama "civilian national security force" like Hitler's SS or Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard? An administration official advocating forced abortions and sterilization agents in drinking water? Beck trafficked in them all in 2009.
He also proposed on his radio show that people should read Hitler's "Mein Kampf" to prepare for Obama's health-care plan -- and that's in addition to the 28 times the Fuhrer made an appearance on Beck's Fox show in 2009. The Anti-Defamation League identified the secret to Beck's success when it noted that he, unlike other prominent right-wing talkers, was willing "to give a platform to the conspiracy theorists and anti-government extremists."
His critics during his ascent over the year have compared the pudgy Fox News host to Father Coughlin, George Wallace and Joe McCarthy. Time magazine put Beck on its cover and asked: "Is Glenn Beck Bad for America?"
A better question might be: "Is Glenn Beck America?" All ages have their charlatans. The fact that Beck's stew of venom and fabrication has been such a triumph probably says less about Beck than about us. He has merely captured the moment.
