From where Lars Larson stands in a roomy Southwest Portland studio to deliver his politically charged talk show in bombastic bass, he looks into the master control room through a huge soundproof window. Larson is on his feet for most of the three hours he's on KXL (750 AM), connected to a statewide audience by wireless headphones and a suspended microphone with a disc-shaped spit guard in front of it. His 9mm Beretta is tucked into a holster on the back of his pants. When he teases out a point he gestures forcefully with his thick arms and hands, as if to some unseen auditorium.

As Larson leads back from a break -- "WELcome back to the LARS LARson Show, taking your PHONE calls and your E-mails..." -- he appears to be waving his arms and debating with his own stout reflection. "The government reminds me of a small-time crook, always looking to see if the car door is open or the billfold is hanging out of the back pocket."

Larson's potent one-man show has made him a powerful player that elected officials, economic development bureaucrats and business leaders can't afford to ignore. Some 400,000 people across Oregon tune in during an average week, putting him ahead of both The Oregonian and Oregon Public Broadcasting for statewide reach. This fall, Larson took over the afternoon and evening slot left by national jock Laura Ingraham on Viacom's Westwood One syndicated service. That puts his unique brand of conservative talk on 160 stations from Alaska to Connecticut.

Larson's appeal is that he casts himself of and for the people. He's a champion of the besieged, real and imagined -- the smoker facing ever more surcharges on cigarettes (Larson himself favors La Gloria Cubana cigars), the old lady who can't subdivide her farmland because of Oregon's land-use laws, the struggling family business drowning in tax bills and red tape. "I care about Oregon, I really do," says Larson, 45, who was raised in Tillamook and Klamath Falls and studied briefly at the University of Oregon before jumping into professional broadcasting. And though he's rumored to make six figures now and hauls in fees from on-air product endorsements, he insists he's more accountable than any government to his constituents, who can dial him up any day of the week or switch stations if they don't like what they're hearing.

Oregon's elected officials -- on both sides of the aisle -- fear his ability to motivate those listeners on any issue that hints of intrusive government or higher taxes. (Larson's learned to force "liberal" out of the back of his mouth like an expletive.) His insistence that the state had money hidden away to prevent service cuts helped keep voters fired up against a temporary tax hike this year. Pollster Tim Hibbitts credits him with turning the tide against the Measure 28 tax hike in January 2003.

"Every time I'm mentioned on his show my

e-mail inbox is full," says state Sen. Ryan Deckert (D-Beaverton), who headed a recent joint committee on tax reform.

Larson's rants have broad implications for the business community. After listening to his show day in and day out, it's hard not to come away with the impression that Oregon is a rotten place to do business and a rotten place to live if you're in business. In Larson's eyes, it's a "tax hell," and the agenda being pursued by moderate business leaders to promote a good quality of life, stable public finances and piecemeal regulatory reform in order to improve the business climate is a waste of time.

Many listeners undoubtedly take Larson with a grain of salt -- KXL's audience research suggests that a third of Larson's listeners don't agree with him and tune in for entertainment.

Still, it's risky to ignore how corrosive Larson's's tone can be, whatever the reason people tune in. "I have real trouble with someone pulling at the social fabric," says Matt Hennessee, chairman of the Portland Development Commission and CEO of Quiktrak. "We have enough hatred."

Business boosters can't help but take notice. "The negativity resonates with a lot of people, but not with me, even if I probably agree with a lot of things he says," says Jim Mark, CEO at the Melvin Mark real estate firm and leader of a privately funded business recruitment effort for Portland. "If you want to build business in an area, you don't constantly destroy what's in the area."

But it's hard to find any authoritative voice to counter Larson's on the show. Business leaders rarely appear. No doubt many are wary of getting into a debate with Larson. He has a head full of facts, is skilled in the art of changing subjects and can use his booming voice to win a heated discussion by sheer volume and rapid-fire delivery. "He's spoiling for a fight," says Peter Bragdon, Gov. Ted Kulongoski's former chief of staff and now VP at Columbia Sportswear, who tunes in to Larson but has never been on the show.

The silence from business and economic development leaders leaves Larson to define the image of Oregon for hundreds of thousands inside the state, and potentially many more outside it. His voice, as loud and clear as any in Oregon, continues to carry farther every day.

LARSON'S INFLUENCE STARTS with the size of his listenership. Over four ratings periods ending in winter 2004, he reached an average of just over 100,000 people in Northwest Oregon alone every week. Among the audience of men 18 and over that KXL targets, Larson reaches more listeners than any of Portland's other top radio slots -- the morning drivetime shows of Bob Miller and Paul Linnman on KEX, Mark and Brian on KGON, and Howard Stern on KUFO.

Tim McNamara, who manages KXL, estimates that up to 300,000 more listeners hear Larson weekly via 15 other stations throughout the state, which puts him in every major community. McNamara says Larson has been crucial to the station's comeback, following the loss of Rush Limbaugh and local host Bill Gallagher in 1997.

"I got creamed after Rush left," says McNamara. "We went from first to worst and now we're back to first. Lars is our

single most valuable asset."

And why do listeners flock to KXL for Larson's 11 a.m.-3 p.m. show? Peter Bragdon says it kills time. "I'm in the car a lot," he says. "I view talk radio as entertainment. And he's certainly provocative."

Nothing's quite as riveting as Larson being "provocative." Take this excerpt of an exchange between Larson, guest Len Bergstein -- once an aide to former Gov. Neil Goldschmidt -- and a caller. The show aired the day after Willamette Week broke the story of Goldschmidt's sexual abuse of a teenager in the 1970s.

CALLER: His financial and political success was based on a good name he didn't deserve.

LARSON: That's right. Len, how 'bout it? I mean, Mussolini made the trains run on time, Hitler got the economy off the ground.

BERGSTEIN: I don't think [Goldschmidt] was looking to be excused.

LARSON: But he was! Dammit, don't do that, Len! He gave this garbage about the heart condition.

Later, Larson asked listeners if Goldschmidt was "any better than [alleged killer] Ward Weaver? I don't think so."

Larson says what works best on radio is a full-fledged debate. But absent that, this kind of talk keeps the listeners rapt and feeds the conservative talk show business model. Listeners get attached to like-minded hosts, and the live, unscripted content keeps them tuned in. McNamara says it's not uncommon for people to keep the dial set on Larson for two hours or more.

And that's made his show an attractive ad buy, says Darcey Price, media director at ad agency Cappelli, Miles, Wiltz, Kelly. "What's more important than the conservative base is Lars' loyal listeners," she says.

The attentive audience also means Larson's message on a wide range of policy issues percolates deeply throughout Oregon. Adam Davis, at opinion polling firm Davis, Hibbitts and Midghall, says Larson's name came up repeatedly in focus groups around the state over the past year, especially when participants were describing their distrust of state government and their suspicion that tax money is being wasted.

"They'd make a reference to something they heard on the show, such as the expensive pizza cutters in the Beaverton School District," Davis says. "There's no one else whose name comes up like that."

LAST DECEMBER, JUST HOURS AFTER ad guru Dan Wieden and Brand Oregon director Debby Kennedy unveiled their new campaign to promote the state's products and recruit new business, Larson was on the air trashing it.

"It looks good in a magazine," Larson says of the "Oregon. We Love Dreamers." campaign. "But if they [businesses] come, and they say, 'I can't get permits, I can't get land, yeah, workers' comp is great but everything else costs me so much more that it's difficult to start a business -- you might have sold them a [bad] bill of goods."

Kennedy was playing catch-up with her branding rollout. "I flew into Roseburg to talk to the Rotary Club and I asked the person picking me up what he knew about Brand Oregon. He said 'nothing other than what Lars Larson said,'" Kennedy remembers. "It's productive to discuss Brand Oregon's worth. But it's not productive to rip something apart if you don't know what it is. I'd be surprised if [Larson] could describe what it actually is."

Brand Oregon is only one in a long series of important business issues Larson has taken on in recent years -- from tax reform to create stable funding for K-12 and higher education, to Portland's South Waterfront district, to the state's most recent trade mission to Asia.

Larson readily admits that he marshals facts selectively. "The rules of the game are 'only what you can find,'" he says about gathering material for his show.

For instance, this winter, as the budget-balancing income tax surcharge headed to the ballot, the 20,000-member Associated Oregon Industries board decided not to oppose or support it, while the more liberal Oregon Business Association backed it. Anti-tax advocates peppered Larson with alternative budgets -- "You trot ideas out to Lars and see if listerners catch on," says Tom Cox, a business consultant and Libertarian Party leader who ran for governor on the Libertarian ticket in 2002.

But in late January, word spread among anti-tax advocates that the governor had a secret stash of $500 million that he could use to offset a failed vote on the tax increase. For Larson, the idea constituted what he calls "found art" and he threw it out to listeners. Russ Walker with Citizens for a Sound Economy, who Larson says first told him of the $500 million stash, later dismissed it as "just a rumor." "I think it got blown out of porportion," Walker said on Jan. 31.

State government did make cuts when the tax increase was voted down -- $284 million of the $800 million was from schools, which meant fewer teachers and larger class sizes. But Larson says he was vindicated by the $179 million in revenue that state Department of Human Services officials found after the vote. "We think it turned out to be true," Larson says. "A quarter of that money turned out in DHS alone."

WHILE LARSON SeiZES any opportunity to show how Oregon is scaring away business, he's usually silent on signs of economic expansion. This spring, third-generation Portland firm Albina Fuel took 30 jobs from Northeast Portland to Vancouver, Wash. Several weeks later, Oregon gained knife maker William Henry Fine Knives from Santa Cruz, Calif. The company announced plans to relocate to McMinnville and ramp up to two dozen jobs in 18 months.

Larson never mentioned the knife maker on his show.

He did offer this monologue on Albina, though: "Ninety years in Northeast Portland and now the company is moving out of the tax hell created by Kitzhaber, Kulongoski, Katz and the Sisters of Hawthorne," Larson said. "Of course, Vera's so focused on capping freeways, baseball parks, choo-choo trains and tax breaks for Pearl District trendies that the last thing she's going to care about is an icky oil company."

Tom Cox says this is productive stuff.

"You have to be brutally honest about your flaws and how you're going to fix them," Cox says. "The Portland government thinks it's just a big happy PR

exercise and if they say enough happy things they can shut up the people who say bad things."

But trash-talking the economy is also simpler and more entertaining than discussing, debating and acknowledging pros and cons.

"Negativity is a much easier paradigm to live by," Jim Mark says. "There are impediments when you're selling business to come here and there's a list of things that make Portland look good. I can detail things about California that make Oregon look like a bargain."

business LEADERS' RELUCTANCE to take on Larson live puts them in good company. Kulongoski and Katz have stayed off the show in recent years. "Larson called my boss names," says Bragdon. Former Gov. Kitzhaber once turned Larson down, saying "You don't accept an invitation to a lynching." Republican House Speaker Karen Minnis took a pass earlier this spring on the day Larson said of her "bucket plan" to put reserve funds away for lean years and cap state spending: "Oregon's going to hell in a bucket if we go with this plan." She later came on the show when Democrats ducked a special legislative session.

Larson thinks the top dogs are copping out.

"He's afraid to face tough questions," Larson says of Kulongoski. "But he's the governor! If you come on and you have good answers you could put a talk show host right in his place."

But Larson's style of debate often collapses into a competition of who can talk louder. And that's usually Larson.

SOLV executive director Jack McGowan went on Larson's show last fall after criticizing conservative talk shows in a speech to the City Club. McGowan's appearance, which he says was originally scheduled for 30 minutes, turned into two hours. He left the studio wrung out and frustrated. "I don't know if I got my point across," is how McGowan puts it, preferring not to dwell on the incident.

And that's why we don't hear many business voices on Larson's show, says Lynn Lundquist of the Oregon Business Association. "You take a CEO of some

company -- what's the advantage of going on?" he asks. "Especially when someone else controls the microphone."

LARSON says he has a grand prescription for turning around the state's slow economy. "I could solve it tomorrow," he says.

First, he would allow the Tillamook State Forest to be cut to what he calls "maximum sustainable yield," which he claims would provide 5,000 jobs. Second, he'd allow property owners the development rights they would enjoy without Oregon's land-use laws.

Whether Larson's plan would deliver is open to debate. A new report from veteran forester John Beuter shows more cutting in the Tillamook would stimulate a spike in jobs in Northwest Oregon. U of O economist Ed Whitelaw, meanwhile, asserts that jobs rise more when forests are left intact.

And what would be the effect of chucking Oregon's land-use laws? Economist John Tapogna did a study for planning advocates and found that in Portland alone, government could be hit up for $3.5 billion to $7 billion if property owners were reimbursed for lost development rights. That's where Larson gets his economic stimulus projections. He says it doesn't matter that the figure was based on the potential liability that governments might face in court if they were forced to reimburse landowners, not actual development that property owners might undertake.

"It would belie all human engineering that if someone were given the value on a piece of land, they would sit on it like a lump on a log and not do anything about it," Larson says.

This fall, voters will likely decide in a ballot initiative whether to change land use laws to allow development similar to Larson's plan. The vote has the potential to dramatically change Oregon's landscape. And you can bet Larson and his callers will debate the proposal, with or without business leaders on the line.

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Copyright 2004 Oregon Business magazine