LIMBAUGH IS BACK ON THE AIR, WITH FANS AND FOES ALL EARS

More than five weeks after he entered a residential treatment center
for what he described as an addiction to prescription pain medication,
Rush Limbaugh is to return to the airwaves today.

While his voice will be beamed into an atmosphere swirling with
questions - not the least of which center on whether he acquired some
of those drugs illegally - one point seems assured: Mr. Limbaugh, by
far the biggest star in talk radio, is poised to draw one of the
biggest audiences in his 15-year career in syndication.

Of those tuning into the program, which will be broadcast live on the
East Coast beginning at noon, the most vocal are likely to be split
into two camps. Some will be loyalists, many of them conservatives,
who have expressed a willingness in recent weeks to forgive Mr.
Limbaugh his transgressions.

Others, however, may be less familiar with his show - many of them the
"feminazis" and other liberals Mr. Limbaugh says he loves to hate -
who wonder how he might reconcile his own behavior with his past
statements recommending jail time for drug users.

"I would expect that Limbaugh's listenership will be three to four
times its normal size when he comes on the air," said Michael
Harrison, the editor and publisher of Talkers magazine, a trade
journal, which estimates Mr. Limbaugh's weekly audience at more than
14.5 million. "Personally, he might be in the worst trench he's ever
been in. But people are curious to hear what Rush's going to say,
which puts him, professionally, at the peak of his career."

Mr. Limbaugh, who is heard on WABC-AM in New York and counts his
audience as closer to 20 million, has done nothing to dampen that
anticipation. A spokesman, Allan Mayer, said on Friday that Mr.
Limbaugh was giving no interviews and would not even say whether he
was planning to broadcast from his studios in Manhattan or those in
West Palm Beach, Fla., near where he has a home.

Before he went silent, Mr. Limbaugh was the subject of news reports in
The National Enquirer and other publications that he had bought drugs
like OxyContin, a powerful painkiller, without a prescription. Other
reports suggested that law enforcement officials were investigating
the matter, and Mr. Limbaugh told his listeners that he would not
discuss any details "until this investigation is complete."

Asked what Mr. Limbaugh might say today, Mr. Mayer said: "The only
people he's going to be speaking to publicly are his own listeners,
through his own microphone. They are going to get it from the horse's
mouth, as it were, the first comments he has to make about his own
situation and his view of the world."

In many ways, how people view Mr. Limbaugh's prospects for recovery -
personally, as well as professionally - depends on their political
affiliations. Mr. Limbaugh had been a hero of the right, particularly
after he helped galvanize those who seized Congress for the
Republicans in 1994.

William J. Bennett, a conservative who served as the so-called drug
czar during the first Bush administration, said in an interview that
Mr. Limbaugh was at the center of "a human drama about a guy who's
having huge success, takes a huge step down, and is now trying to get
himself in shape."

That Mr. Limbaugh, with his advocacy of stiff punishment for drug
offenders, would himself admit to a long-term addiction was evocative
of the situation that Mr. Bennett was in earlier this year. One of the
nation's pre-eminent moral crusaders, Mr. Bennett acknowledged that he
had set a poor example by "too much gambling."

Nonetheless, Mr. Bennett sought in the interview to distinguish his
own shortcomings from the conduct of Mr. Limbaugh, a close friend who
has dined at his home, once with Justice Clarence Thomas. "Not an
addiction," Mr. Bennett said of his own actions, as if ticking off a
list of talking points, "not a problem, no therapy, gambling too much,
stopped it."

And yet Mr. Bennett said that Mr. Limbaugh deserved to be judged less
severely than former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat and perennial
Limbaugh target, who was impeached in 1999 over his deceptions
regarding an affair with a White House intern. "He's not president of
the United States," Mr. Bennett said of Mr. Limbaugh. "He's not
blaming his accusers. He's not lying. He's not lying under oath."

"He was manly," Mr. Bennett added of Mr. Limbaugh. "He was
straightforward."

To Phil Friedman, a Democratic strategist who has worked for former
Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, former Mayor Edward I. Koch and Senator Robert C.
Byrd of West Virginia, the circumstances of Mr. Limbaugh's fall may
differ from those of Mr. Clinton's, but the loyalty of his fiercest
supporters is a common thread. Mr. Friedman also saw parallels to the
situation of Marion S. Barry Jr., who was re-elected mayor of
Washington in 1994, four years after investigators caught him in a
hotel room smoking crack cocaine.

"When you have a constituency that strong and an audience that
devoted, they will forgive you anything, short of murder," Mr.
Friedman said. "I think the cause is so important to them that they're
not willing to sacrifice a leader because of his personal flaws."

After announcing on Oct. 10 that he was addicted to prescription
painkillers and was checking into a rehabilitation center for 30 days,
Mr. Limbaugh was replaced by a succession of guest hosts, including
Tony Snow and Walter Williams, both political commentators, and Matt
Drudge, the creator of the online Drudge Report (drudgereport.com).

It will be several weeks before Arbitron, the ratings service,
compiles the audience figures during that period. But Mr. Mayer said
that surveys of about 1,000 listeners each week, conducted for Mr.
Limbaugh's producers by another company, showed that few were
defecting. Moreover, the 150 advertisers who buy time on Mr.
Limbaugh's nationally syndicated broadcast have expressed their desire
to continue to do so, Mr. Mayer said, and none of the 600 stations
that carry the program have dropped it.

The passion of Mr. Limbaugh's loyal listeners, who refer to themselves
as dittoheads, has been on parade daily on rushlimbaugh.com, his Web
site, which as of yesterday had posted reams of e-mail messages sent
by well-wishers since his departure. All were identified by their
first names and hometowns, as if they were calling in to the show.

They included Akiva from New York, who wrote that Mr. Limbaugh was in
the prayers "of all your fans at my rabbinical seminary."

Mr. Limbaugh has said that he became addicted to painkillers after
spinal surgery in the 1990's, an admission that prompted a torrent of
similar testimony. "I made it," wrote Richard of South Lyon, Mich.,
"you can too!!!"

There is much riding on whether Mr. Limbaugh can beat his addiction,
including a lot of money. His program generates many millions in
advertising revenue, not only for Clear Channel Communications, which
owns the company that syndicates it, but for the stations that
broadcast his program.

Rick Jackson, the general manager of WBT, an AM station in Charlotte,
N.C., that has carried Mr. Limbaugh for more than a decade, said he
expected today to be "one of the biggest days in our broadcast
history" - maybe even bigger, he said, than the few hours during
Hurricane Hugo in 1989 when WBT was believed to be the only local
station on the air.

"Now who knows what will happen after he returns?" Mr. Jackson said.
"A lot will depend on how he handles it."