The microphone light went dim for a few minutes chock full of commercial messages while Bob Grant, seated calmly at the center of a storm of charges that he is the city's leading radio bigot, picked up the thread of an interrupted conversation with a visitor in the broadcast booth.
"We have a phrase in this business: There's chicken talk, and there's honest talk," he said as 20 phone buttons of waiting call-in fans blinked silently at his elbow, lined up in his defense. "Chicken talk is, 'Kind of windy out, let's talk about the weather.' When I broke in everything was kind of, sort of. 'I'm kind of mad, I'm sort of disappointed.' We always had to put a euphemism there."
Lean and natty, Mr. Grant, who has survived 45 years thus far in the radio business, smiled in satisfaction at how noticeably he had progressed from the chicken talk days.
With his phone bank boiling over with support in the face of demands for an advertisers' boycott of his show, Mr. Grant seemed kind of amused and sort of encouraged yesterday evening. His unrepentant remarks flowed forth from WABC-AM on the station's lucrative afternoon drive-time broadcast, a station that some offended members of the black community dismiss as WKKK.
"It goes with the territory," commented the talk-radio impresario. He has stirred repeated, often race-related notoriety over his 25 years in New York with such descriptions as "men's room attendant" for former Mayor David N. Dinkins, "savages" for the Los Angeles rioters of 1992 and "pygmy mentality" for Representative Charles B. Rangel, and with his heartfelt warning to the Government not to pick up the Haitian boat refugees. "You know what the ideal situation would be?" he asked on that broadcast. "If they drowned! Then they would stop coming."
For all this and more, a coalition of New Jersey ministers and civil rights protesters demanded the advertisers' boycott, and Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a Bob Grant fan who credits the broadcaster with helping her get elected, said she now had second thoughts about appearing on his show.
The sudden outcry over what Mr. Grant has essentially been saying for years is rooted in the fact that he has emerged as a vocal principal and not just a background voice in political campaigns, usually choosing to promote conservative candidates while acidly lampooning their opponents. This year, Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, one of his daily targets, tarred Mr. Grant in turn as a racist.
The radio host said he was complimented by such attention and expected the furor to die down once the election was over. "Bob Grant carried Christie in," he said, describing what he feels is a point of fear in the Lautenberg campaign.
"It's boomeranging," he declared spiritedly at his microphone, urging his listeners to upset the Senator.
In verifying his most controversial remarks, Mr. Grant apologizes for sounding like "every two-bit politician" but says the remarks should only be judged in their full contexts. But his mood seemed closer to exuberance than depression about it all as the switchboard blazed and he re-opened the microphone after another burst of commercials.
"She should fall down on her knees and ask forgiveness," one caller growled in denouncing Governor Whitman. Mr. Grant, amused at his caller's passion, tried to make a bit of stereotypical fun of it all: "WASPs don't do that. They don't fall on their knees. You're thinking Italians or Greeks."
Anyone who listens to Mr. Grant's show, which claims an audience of up to 150,000, can sense how it is the callers, more often than the hosts, who have made the station's predominantly right-wing array of talk shows into a Coliseum of rhetorical arenas, where issues often throb with a lions-versus-Christians polarity.
Mr. Grant makes strategic use of the fray. Yesterday, he interrupted one caller who was denouncing "racist blacks which I consider to be the majority in this country," asking him whether such a generalization was warranted when a partitive might do.
"I'm suddenly very sensitive to the charge," the host explained.
"Don't tell me you're folding, too," the caller fairly wailed in alarm as Mr. Grant segued to another of the many commercials. He said he had not yet lost a single sponsor and did not expect to, even if the controversy has escalated to "this cauldron that's being stirred."
The microphone light was soon back on, with the switchboard fully blinking and Mr. Grant easing into a familiar dismissal of two of his most persistent critics, the Rev. Jesse Jackson -- whom Mr. Grant likes to tweak as "Reverend Jerkson" -- and the Rev. Al Sharpton. "Those guys wouldn't know an honest day's work if it were presented to them, because they live high off the hog," he said.
Then, mocking the bigotry complaints, he added: "Could that be misconstrued?"
"Much too much is being made out of this," he told callers who normally relish heated denunciation, but accused his critics of visiting Stalinism, a Pearl Harbor attack and a crucifixion upon Mr. Grant.
He proudly noted on the air that one of his regular partisans, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, had announced uninvited that he would be back on the show at the next opportunity. Mr. Giuliani had sat by silently on the air when Mr. Grant made his "pygmy" allusion to Representative Rangel, a Harlem Democrat.
"Maybe Rudy will need someone like me to be a liaison with the new Governor," Mr. Grant said. He smiled at his microphone in the switchboard glow as he once again endorsed George E. Pataki in New York and denounced Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, using a word from the Italian vulgate that approximates the meaning of "lowlife."
