Radio’s Michael Savage decries Obama attacks, sorta

Talk radio host Michael Savage has fueled doubts about President Obama’s U.S. birth certificate, called the president a “Leninist” and a “Marxist” and generally worked himself into a lather about all the wrongs he says the Democratic leader has committed against America.

Now the radio hotspur has warned others in his line of work that they are “committing suicide” with relentless and unimaginative attacks on Obama.

Savage’s commentary appears to be more about style than substance, though, and hardly a moment of self-reflection.

The host made his comments on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on Sunday night, comparing conservative radio commentators today to those on the left who attacked President George W. Bush, particularly after he won a second term in 2004.

Savage noted that liberal Air America radio went off the air in 2010. “All they did was…Bush bashing and they were just crazy in the Bush bashing,” Savage said. “Boring. Boring. How much could you listen to? It wasn’t even clever Bush bashing.”

PHOTOS: President Obama’s past

“This is what’s going on now with the conservatives. They’re committing suicide. Just attacking Obama – although he deserves it – is not good radio,” Savage added. “Remember one thing, radio is primarily an entertainment medium. It was not created to be the voice of the Republican Party or the Democrat Party.”

Savage went on to tell Klein that conservative hosts would succeed only if they made their stories about Obama and other topics as engaging as “your best professors” once did.

So, perhaps taking his own advice, Savage went on to talk about Obama, not by merely calling the president a “Marxist” but by relating that theme to his own family.

“My grandfather fled communist Russia, and he fled communism to come here so we could all have a better life,” Savage said on the program. “Now, I’m sorry to say, quite a few years down the road, we have under Obama the Marxist system that most countries on earth have eschewed, thrown away, rejected as failed. Everything they’ve rejected, these idiots propose as something wonderful and new and modern and the way to save the country. It’s astounding to me what I’m living through.”

So, call the president a “Marxist” gratuitously: bad radio. Call the president a “Marxist,” with a bit of family reminiscence: good radio. This is what amounts to progress in the radio personality’s domain, which he proudly calls the “Savage Nation.”

Follow Politics Now on Twitter and Facebook

James.rainey@latimes.com

Twitter: @latimesrainey