Part two of our epic dissection of the Clinton impeachment scandal. This week: The story breaks, the House indicts, the Senate demurs and Mike rants more than usual about the media. Digressions include Mark Fuhrman, “Broadcast News” and gay porn.
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Part two of our epic dissection of the Clinton impeachment scandal. This week: The story breaks, the House indicts, the Senate demurs and Mike rants more than usual about the media. Digressions include Mark Fuhrman, “Broadcast News” and gay porn.
Continue reading →
Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch
Where to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
The Clinton Impeachment
Sarah: My fun fact on my Tinder profile, at the time that I had Tinder, was finding a way to break it to men that I was going to be much larger than them, generally. And they were just going to have to fucking deal with it.
Welcome to You're Wrong About, a podcast where we tell you what you're wrong about and what we in the past have been wrong about ourselves.
Mike: I think the taglines are getting worse.
Sarah: Really? Okay. You do one.
Mike: That one was fine.
Sarah: We can just do several and do that thing of like the Lord of the rings, where there's like four or five endings and they just had them all, because why not? I'm Sarah Marshall and I've written for The Believer, and the New Republic, and Buzzfeed.
Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I am a “journalist”, with quote marks around it, for The Washington Post.
Sarah: There you go.
Mike: So last episode we talked about Monica Lewinsky and her relationship with Bill Clinton.
Sarah: And Ken Starr's relationship with Bill Clinton.
Mike: Yes. So this week we are focusing on the scandal, breaking the impeachment and the aftermath.
Sarah: The aftermath.
Mike: Because we thought there weren't enough podcasts tediously linking the Clinton impeachment to our current political moment.
Sarah: Well, this would always be a relevant story. This is the stuff of Greek tragedy and Shakespeare. And this is a story that we're always going to be telling.
Mike: So what is your narrative of the actual fact of the impeachment?
Sarah: It's funny because you and I talk so much about book proposals, and now we get to talk about what could a person be driven to do if they're working out a book proposal. And that's one of the situations in their life.
So Linda Tripp has a vendetta against the Clinton white house, as many Republicans do at the time. And we can call her a republican, right? I know she has right wing leanings.
Mike: I think that's fair.
Sarah: And so she feels that if people knew what a body and ribald place the Clinton white house was, and how many relationships Clinton is having with female staffers, then maybe there would be more anti-Clinton sentiment, or she would be able to take him down that way. That's my understanding of her motives.
Mike: I think it's more like she just saw an opportunity. You're probably not super predisposed to Trump. And if some random friend of yours was like, “Oh yeah, I knew Donald Trump in the eighties and he sold me a bunch of coke.” You'd probably be like, “Oh, this is an interesting opportunity, I know this person, maybe I can get some dirt on Donald Trump.”
So she starts recording the conversation. She goes to Newsweek who doesn't publish it because of journalism ethics, something, they can't confirm it.
Sarah: And she had previously been working on a different book proposal. And talked about the Kathleen Willy incident, and other relationships that she'd noticed Bill Clinton having, and then had backed out of it. And then it was like coming back into the business of Bill Clinton stories.
Mike: Is that in Bill Toobin's book? I don't know that aspect.
Sarah: That's in Toobin's book. Yeah. It talks about her working with a literary agent who was known for putting together books that were essentially political smear campaigns. And Linda Tripp was for a while putting together a proposal for a book about the ribald things that she had observed at the Clinton white house, and ultimately backed out. I think primarily because she was concerned about losing her job at the Pentagon.
One of the things that I can say with confidence about Linda Tripp is that her Pentagon salary was $80,000 a year, and she was concerned about the financial payout of coming out with this book that would make her unemployable in the Pentagon any longer, versus keeping her job there. And ultimately was like, you know what, it's not worth it it's too much of a risk, and backed out. But then, and then this is the part of the story that you know, I think.
Mike: Well, so I've been looking into this book by this guy named Ken Gormley called, Clinton versus Starr. And he goes into sort of the history of how this case got into the hands of Kenneth Starr. One of the interesting, weird details of this is that Linda Tripp goes to Newsweek. Newsweek is like, “Eh, we don't know if we can really run this.” Then Linda Tripp goes to Kenneth Starr. But Kenneth Starr's deputy, whose name I forget, agrees to meet with her and listens to the tapes and everything else, without telling Ken Starr.
So Gormley goes over how the most monumental decision of the entire six year history of the office of the independent counsel wasn't made by Ken Starr. It's actually a huge deal that the independent counsel took this left turn away from Whitewater. They were supposed to be investigating Whitewater. They hadn't really found anything. As you mentioned, he gets a job at Pepperdine, but there's this huge outcry from conservatives, “Why are you giving up on the movement?” Whatever. So he decides to dive back in. And then he just, at this point, he's under pressure to produce something, he's looking for anything. And then this deputy decides to take this turn to just going to look into whatever random ass shit we can dig up. And so this woman says she has tapes. Sure. She has tapes.
Linda Tripp and Lewinsky were scheduled to have lunch at the Ritz Carlton the day after Tripp goes to the Starr investigation. So it's basically within like 12 hours, the Starr investigation has to be like, ah, we want you to wear a wire, and goes into hyperdrive to make this thing happen and to make this an official part of the investigation.
Sarah: Because they're like, finally for the first time in years, something is actually happening in this investigation.
Mike: There's also this thing of he's going to be under oath, and he's already turned in a form to Paula Jones’ lawyers that asks on the form, ‘name all of the federal employees with whom you've had sexual relations’ and he's written ‘none’. So they have in writing, that he's committed perjury. So they're already pushing on this door and Linda Tripp just kicks it open because she has tapes.
Although Gormley also mentioned, one of the other forgotten things about this, is that the tapes are never admissible in court. Later on, after Tripp turns over all the tapes, they hire an FBI forensic audio analyst, whatever. And unlike the seamless editing on this show, they can tell that Linda Tripp has edited the tapes.
Sarah: What? Herself?
Mike: Or somebody.
Sarah: And whatever the actual tapes were saying to begin with wasn't convincing enough, even though she's saying all of these things?
Mike: So apparently the night before the Starr report comes out, Starr’s team is frantically going through the Starr report and removing all of the references to the tapes.
Sarah: So Linda Tripp is wearing a wire, and she goes and has lunch with Monica Lewinsky at the Ritz-Carlton.
Mike: Yeah. That's how Ken Starr finds out about Lewinsky, ties her to the Paula Jones case, Clinton is under oath. And then the whole case of perjury really does hinge on this form that he filled out with the word ‘none’ and the famous, ‘I did not have sexual relations’. So there's the famous thing where he stands at a podium and he says, ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky’. He's not under oath at that point, that's just a public speech. But there's also a deposition that he gives for the Paula Jones trial, where he says, ‘I did not have sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky’.
And so a lot of the constitutional scholars, whose kind of random academic articles I read after this, they say that the real fault is with Paula Jones’ lawyers, that Paula Jones’ lawyers didn't follow up and weren't like, “So you say you didn't have sexual relations. Did you have oral sex? Did you kiss?” They're just like, okay, thanks, and they moved on.
And so it's actually arguable whether he lied about sex, because not to be to Clintonian about it, but like sexual relations could actually mean specifically the sex penetrative act. And under some definitions of sex, he didn't actually have sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, he just got a bunch of blow jobs.
Sarah: He didn't even get a bunch of blowjobs.
Mike: No, he got eight.
Sarah: But how many did he receive to completion?
Mike: Two.
Sarah: So, didn't he receive two? Let's go drive this argument right into the ground. Let's just run with it. You talked about how he seemed to have the somewhat superstitious belief that if he did not finish, then it wasn't real. And that he suddenly became guilty about their relationship after she gave him an entire blow job for the first time. So one might argue, except that they did, you know, but then they did.
Mike: He also lied under oath about, “Have you ever been alone in a room with Ms. Lewinsky?” He also lied about that.
Sarah: Well, that's an ambiguous one.
Mike: No, that's an ambiguous one. That kind of thing though, the perjury, I don't know. The perjury is pretty weak, dude. There was a lot of legal scholarship at the time that this might have been the first case in American history where somebody was tried for perjury for facts unrelated to their actual case.
So apparently in the entire country, there had only ever been two people convicted of perjury for lying about sex. But for both of those cases, the sex was actually central to the case. So one of them was a basketball coach who had been accused of sleeping with his players. And one of his players lied under oath about whether or not she slept with him, and she was charged with perjury. Another one was about a doctor who's sleeping with his patients. And again, one of the patients lied under oath about whether he had slept with her. And those are two people that were tried for perjury for sex, basically. But apparently nobody could find a case in American jurisprudence where somebody was tried for perjury for just, you're under oath for cheating on your taxes. And then somebody in the middle of your case is just like, oh, Hey, do you litter? Do you cheat at monopoly? Have you had sex with your secretary? And then you lie about those things. And then you get prosecuted.
In general, people do not prosecute you for perjury unless it's central to the case, unless it actually matters. And so Geraldo Rivera, of all people, offers a $10,000 reward for anyone who can find evidence of a case in the United States where somebody is - he somehow is a Clinton defender before he becomes whatever warlock he is now.
Sarah: He also hosted in the ‘80s a special about Satanism in America as a call back to the satanic panic and actively abetted the spread of all that insanity. So do you think Geraldo just has a giant wheel that he spends when something's happening politically, and it lands on like, ‘inflammatory accusations’. And he's like, okay.
Mike: Yeah. And what's interesting is nobody ever came forward. And when you think about it, if this happened to a private citizen, you would think it was really weird, right?
Sarah: You would say, who has it out for this guy for God's sake?
Mike: That's one of the arguments that this whole thing is a total witch hunt. There's also the obstruction of justice charge. There's nine, I think, indictments or nine charges in the Starr report. It's like, one of the things is he lied under oath and there's like, he encourages other people to lie under oath. He encouraged Lewinsky to file a false affidavit. There are these nine things, only four of them go forward to the House. The House acts like a grand jury where it basically decides which charges to indict and what the factual findings are. And then the Senate decides whether to remove from office.
Sarah: So you're actually tried by a jury of your peers as a politician, which is terrible.
Mike: I guess, theoretically, or like that's a way to look at it. What's really interesting though, looking back at all, is mostly, when we look back at the legacy of this, we look at Monica and Bill. When you think about it, what happened there is not of all that much consequence. Whereas all this impeachment stuff is actually a huge consequence because it was only the second time there'd ever been an impeachment trial. It was Andrew Johnson in 1860. And bill in 1998, 1999. And that's it.
Sarah: And was Nixon just being threatened with impeachment?
Mike: Yeah, Nixon was about to go to the trial, and they were going to have it. But what's interesting about all these constitutional law articles that I read was that basically the Senators and the House reps were just totally making it up as they went along because literally no one had been alive for the last one.
Sarah: And Strom Thurman had been far too young to remember it very well. He was only in his early twenties.
Mike: But so at one point, Senators are planning on having two trials where one is based on the findings of fact, whether or not we believe the accusations or not. And then a second trial of sentencing, do we want to remove him from office or not? And all these constitutional scholars, these people like Lawrence Tribe and stuff are like, “Ah, no, you can't do that. That's unconstitutional. You can't just make stuff up.” You can't have two, that's not how impeachment works.
So there's this huge fight between constitutional scholars and the actual politicians about, what do we actually want to do? And the thing is, this is actually really consequential for setting a precedent. So I think I read a bunch of stuff by this guy named James Rogan, who was a rep from California, a former prosecutor, who was on the judicial committee, the House judiciary committee that was basically trying this case. And he said, essentially, maybe you think these perjury charges are bullshit, maybe you don't, fine. But the fact is the way the system works is it creates precedence. And it's a pretty bad precedent if we have a president who we know he perjured himself, we know he obstructed justice, and we just wave our hands and go, eh, it's not that big of a deal. His argument, and I actually find this pretty convincing, that just because the perjury didn't matter and just because the obstruction of justice didn't matter. You shouldn't just say, oh, well, we're just not going to prosecute at this time because then what happens when the next person that gets accused of perjury? What happens if the next President gets accused of obstruction of justice?
Sarah: To which I'm sure a lot of people said, “Oh, surely we'll only elect appropriate people as president.”
Mike: The country is only getting better from here. So why should we worry?
Sarah: Yeah. One of the facts that came out in the OJ Simpson trial - because we have to mention the OJ Simpson trial once per episode - is that the LAPD were so used to concocting semi-truthful testimony, they called testifying in a trial, ‘testa-lying’, because it was like, obviously you're going to make stuff up, that's just part of it. And so when Fuhrman is indicted for perjury, I think there's also a little bit of a sense of, of course the police are lying all the time, that's their job.
Mike: We can't prosecute them all.
Sarah: I guess the sense that we're gonna, that we're going to prosecute or impeach Bill Clinton for lying under oath because it was perjury in the context of the Paula Jones suit. And also because we have an expectation that the president will tell the truth to us and you're like, that's totally reasonable, but do we really think that about the president?
Mike: It's weird to think of these political times with any nostalgia, right? Even though objectively they're significantly better than our times. But at the time, this was seen through partisan decline of the Republic lenses. Everyone sort of agreed that this was dumb and a huge waste of everybody's time and a huge opportunity cost. And there was no point in pursuing it, but it got pursued. And one of, I think the signs of how much more, just civilized and bipartisan things were back then.
So the morning that they impeached President Clinton, because technically the house did impeach him, but he was not removed from office. So whenever you say ‘Clinton wasn't impeached’, some pedant pops out of a trash can to be like, ‘actually he was impeached’. So technically he was like, fine, you win your debate club, whatever. So in the morning when he's impeached by the house, Bob Livingston, who is the speaker of the house, a Republican, announces we have decided to impeach President Clinton, and I'm resigning because I cheated on my wife. This is the level of just like rocks that everybody is corrupt.
And then what's interesting is President Clinton, who has just been impeached by this guy, calls him up and he's like, oh, I don't think you should resign, you're too important as a politician. This is a member of the other party who has just impeached him, and Clinton is encouraging him to stay in office and saying, “Oh, it's between you and your wife. We should all move on”. This is the level of, maybe you call it collusion or maybe you just call it comedy, but it was a time when there were much more of these kinds of bi-partisan calls for civilization, sophistication type of thing.
Sarah: Well do you think that there was maybe a lottery feeling in Washington at the time, of everyone else being like, it could have been me. And maybe they're just being a sense of Washington in that moment being a New England village and spring having a morality house cleaning and people grasping onto the radical idea of, maybe I shouldn't cheat on my partner constantly.
Mike: Yeah. For the impeachment trial, one thing that was really interesting is that nobody wanted it. So a lot of politicians afterwards say that there was a sense of, well, we have to do something.
Sarah: So it's like prosecuting a white man, generally. It's just like, listen, obviously the system wasn't set up to do this, but sometimes you have to.
Mike: Ken Starr shows up famously with 35 boxes of evidence, this six year investigation, witnesses, tapes, depositions, the whole thing. And no one really disputes the facts of it. So the house kind of feels like, well, we don't necessarily really care, but we have to be seen to be doing something.
Sarah: And are there house Republicans who are like, yes, finally time to take down Bill Clinton or are most people just like, eh, this is silly.
Mike: Yeah, there is that. This James Rogan guy who was on the house, judicial committee says in this interview that he did years later, he talks about how well, what we really wanted to get him on was Whitewater and selling missile codes to the Chinese, which I've never even heard of the selling missile codes to the Chinese conspiracy theory, but it's just one of those things that just sound so Clintonian where I'm sure that the minute you look into it, it's something really boring or some misunderstanding, but got whipped up into this huge thing.
Sarah: I love how they're like, well, we really wanted him for this boring real estate slash loan shark collusion deal. I guess we'll settle for him having had an affair inside the White House. Yeah. Whitewater seemed like a sure bet.
Mike: Well, he also mentioned it. So the interviewer specifically asks him, so why do you think Starr didn't do any indictments for Whitewater? And this guy who was on the house judiciary committee, he's like, oh, we think the corruption went so deep that he was saving it until after Lewinsky. And it's like, so he spent three years, tried to quit, came back, and was prosecuted for a completely different thing while indicting no one whatsoever on his central task. Yeah, he was definitely waiting. That makes perfect sense.
Sarah: I feel like there should be something called the, so you're telling me arguments where, and it's the same thing that we talked about with Anita Hill, where in order to address someone's counter-argument to what's clearly going on, you're like, so you're telling me…
Mike: The central thing to know about the Clinton impeachment is that Clinton's approval ratings were sky high the whole time. It was this paradox that 65% to 70% of Americans approved of his job performance. And so Republicans were looking at this, we don't want to do this. It looks like a witch hunt. It looks partisan. We would rather gin up real scandals. Another thing to keep in mind at the center of this is that in the middle of the trial, it was a 13 month process, the Republicans got dinged in an election. 1998 is an election year. And it's so bad for Republicans that Newt Gingrich, the Speaker of the House, announced he's resigning, because he had been saying, we're going to pick up seats on the back of this.
And this James Rogan guy, the congressional guy, got voted out of office in 2000 because his own constituents didn't like that he went on this witch hunt. And so Republicans know that it's not a good look for them. The economy is doing really well. The country generally likes Bill Clinton. It makes everyone look silly, right? That all these Republicans are like on podiums, under oath being like Mr. Clinton received a blow job. They just don't want to talk about it. It's like me in the last episode. They don't want to know. They don't want to deal with it. They don't want to think about it. Everybody wants to move on and it's making everybody look bad. But then there's this kind of rolling snowball of, well we have to do something.
So one of the weirdest things is that after the House indicts him, sends these charges to the Senate for the Senate to then decide if he's going to be removed from office, four House Republicans who voted to indict, send a letter to the Senate saying we don't think he should be removed from office. And then all these constitutional scholars have to write op-eds in the New York Times being like you are misunderstanding the process. This is a process to remove someone from office. If you don't think he should be removed from office, you should do nothing.
Sarah: It's like when guilty jurors come forward and are like, oh no, I didn't mean it. I think we've convicted an innocent man. And it's like, why couldn't you have mentioned that earlier?
Mike: Well, that's the thing. If you don't think that it rises to the level of impeachment, don't impeach him. The goal of impeachment is removing someone from office.
Sarah: It's a soft impeachment. You're like, no, I take it back. Or like, I'm going to go along with everyone because that's my job, obviously, but I'm going to feel bad about it in a semi-public way.
Mike: The thing is that everyone is hunting around for some specific procedure. They want some official procedure to punish him or to express their disapproval for what he did. But removing him from office is just too much and they know it's gonna make them look totally disproportionate to what the actual crime was. And so the Senate Republicans try to censure him. This was one of the things I remember being vaguely aware of as a 16 year old, was that they were going to censure the president. And the Democrats are like, what the fuck is wrong with you? This is an impeachment proceeding. There's no such thing as a censure. That's not what we're doing. We're deciding whether to remove him from office.
Sarah: What is censure?
Mike: It's basically just like demerits.
Sarah: Really? It's like you're in Boy Scouts?
Mike: Yeah. Because my understanding is there's no punishment. Everyone wanted a way to use their office to disapprove of the president without actually meaningfully punishing him. So that's what everyone was like flip-flopping around and trying to find, and over and over again, these poor academics, people who've actually been studying and reading about how impeachment works and who know the constitution are like, guys, no, you can't do that. You can't just make stuff up.
Sarah: It must be terrible to be one of these brilliant constitution scholars, because you're just toiling in your little constitutional thinking area. And you're like, someday the constitution will become really relevant to something a lot of Americans care about, and then my moment will come. And then the moment comes and you're like, the constitution says we should do this. And everyone's like, there's no time. We can't look at the constitution. We have to just make something up.
Mike: I have many beefs with the constitution, but one of them is that it is extremely difficult to remove the head of state. And it is extremely poorly defined. High crimes and misdemeanors? First of all, those are two different things. Secondly, we don't know what those are or how they're defined. And this is the big fight of course at the time is, well, what's a high crime? There have been a couple of federal judges that have been impeached. So only one presidential impeachment trial, but there's been something like 12 federal judges in the last hundred years that have been impeached. And so they're trying to use that as case law for, what is it? But no one can really figure it out.
And of course, my personal theory on this is that the changing media landscape means that this whole thing of approval ratings are much more central to the way that politicians make decisions. Because there was a time when there were polls of presidential approval, but the country didn't know about them. All of our political conversations now, and I think this is a legacy of Clinton, all of our conversations now take place on two levels. There's the scandal and there's, what does Ohio think about the scandal? How is the scandal going to play out? There's always this kind of two layer of thinking.
Sarah: It's always about trying to conceptualize some average American who doesn't actually exist. It's some person so average that they're not real, but that's always the person who you're theorizing with the pole model. Yeah.
Mike: And there's always this, you're doing the fact and the reaction to the fact at the same time. Trump has been found to be doing this thing and his base doesn't care. This was one of the first scandals where that dynamic was playing out, that it was the Teflon Bill. And one of the theoretical arguments that I read was about how most of the American population considered this entertainment. This was the time when news and entertainment were merging and most people said that they read a lot of news about this and they followed it a lot, but it was something like the Royal wedding or something. It wasn't something that they considered to be an issue of national importance. And so it didn't really affect the way they thought about the president in any real substantial way. They just thought, okay, he's a sleazeball. But his sleazeball-ary doesn't have anything to do with the actual presidency so it doesn't affect the way that I think about him.
Sarah: Yeah. And I wonder what the last thing that you could call a major scandal, or a major political scandal was before this. Tonya Harding was a major scandal. The OJ Simpson trial wasn't exactly a scandal, but man was in a narrative. So that starts in 1994 and then it goes, I think until October of 1995, until the fall of that year. 1996, 1997. What did we have? The things that come to mind are Princess Diana dies and Titanic comes out.
Mike: And these were political scandals. One of the articles I read contrasted the Clinton impeachment, and Watergate. And one of the things they said was that during Watergate, you weren't constantly hearing about the president's approval rating. That wasn't part of the narrative. It was more about the actual wrongdoing. And there's something weird about when journalists try to talk about how things will play. It's a way of not taking credit for something, it's a way of not having an opinion.
Whereas if you say we found this thing that a president has done, and we think it's super corrupt, that looks opinionated. We found that the president was impregnating his mistress, fine. Any moral outrage that you, as a journalist, show about that event sounds like you're being partisan, you're having a witch hunt, blah, blah, blah. Whereas if you say, oh, we found this thing and we polled his voters and they don't seem to care, it's a way of looking objective. It's a way of saying, oh, you don't know how this is going to play in Peoria. It's this next level of thinking that allows you to be above it all. It's like, I'm not actually saying that this thing is bad, I'm just saying that this thing has happened.
Sarah: Well it's so useful to be able to do that because people will react every way that there is to react to something. And this reminds me that I was just watching a Barbara Walters interview that she did with Monica Lewinsky at the time that all this was unfolding, and her intro is something like people have called you a bimbo, a stalker, like again with the bimbos, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What do you have to say? And it's just like, Monica, this is your life, face the nation. And it's like, Barbara, you are saying things and saying that the American public is saying and thinking them is fine and some of them are, and I'm sure millions of them are, but also this is really about you needing an excuse to call someone a bimbo on TV.
Mike: It's a way for journalists to be the conduit for the American people and not themselves. It's like I am but a vessel for the concerns of the American people and I don't have to take credit. One of the most fascinating articles I read about this was about the transition in media between Watergate and Clinton. People noticed at the time that news and entertainment were merging, that news had gotten more frivolous, and more scandal and personality focused, and they looked at the phenomenon of soundbites, that before they did word counts of how long the clips were of politicians. And they would allow politicians to say like 250 words, they would talk for like 17,25 seconds or something, which now would seem interminable.
Sarah: Ugh, 25 seconds.
Mike: What's really interesting though, is that the soundbite thing is real. And I remember us complaining a lot about soundbites in the nineties, like, oh, it's all sound bite journalism.
Sarah: I remember that too.
Mike: But what's interesting is that when they look at the actual amount of time that's spent and how that has changed from Watergate to Clinton impeachment, they find that soundbites actually don't take up that much of the change. The real change was from information to analysis. What really happened from the seventies to the nineties was journalists themselves became much more prominent in the coverage. So they used to have a lot of interviews with experts, interviews with lawyers, interviews with lawmakers, and that information from the experts would form the spine of the TV news report on any scandal.
Whereas once we get to the Clinton era, the people, the personalities, the Barbara Walters, the Anderson Cooper's, whoever's, are the center of the actual story. So they are creating the narrative and their analysis of the narrative of the political ramifications, whatever, takes up way more time than the information in the report. And that, to me, feels like it was more invisible at the time and more pernicious too. As a guy who edits videos, I think editing videos down to shorter clips is okay. But I also think that once you're putting more currency into analysis than into information, you're distorting things in a way without seeing how you're distorting them. You're shifting the balance between opinion and information, and you're leaving your audience feeling something rather than knowing something.
Sarah: Well, and I think you can also over time weaken the consumer and also the citizenry of the country that you're telling the stories within, because if you have people who grow up accustomed to being told, here's what's happening, here's what you think about it, then they're not going to develop the ability to do that on their own if they have to do that every day in order to figure out what's going on. So when I was, I think 14 or 15, I saw Broadcast News for the first time.
Mike: I love that movie.
Sarah: It's so good. And unfortunately though, at the age of 14 or so, I was like, God, I just want to be like Holly Hunter in that movie when I grow up. And then about 10 years later, I was like, oh my God, I'm Holly Hunter in that movie. This is terrible.
Mike: But that is what that movie is about though, right? The stand up and the way that the anchors become central to these stories.
Sarah: Yeah. And the big moment. And God bless this movie for existing that it's Holly hunter having romantic feelings for both William Hurt who's the character, the charismatic megafauna who joins the newsroom and Albert Brooks who's the adorable nebbish. And the big moment where she realizes that she can never in good conscience pursue a relationship with William Hurt because she can't feel attracted to someone who does something journalistically unethical is when he does something that’s not actually unethical.
Mike: He fakes crying when he's interviewing somebody. Yeah. And it's him bringing in the new age of journalism. And of course the William Hurt's of the world 30 years later have won and are not trying to do anything unethical a lot of the time, but they're just like, look, this is a story about me as a conduit for the American public and I'll react, and I'll set the emotional tone of this. And it's something that's both vain and makes a sort of celebrity culture where it doesn't matter, where we trust people based on who they are and their sort of personalities and not on the credibility of the facts that they're saying, because it's about who they are and not what they're actually telling us.
Mike: Well, one thing that really strikes me is I think this was the beginning of the era of scandal in politics. There's actually a book that came out in 1992 called Scandal about how over the previous decade about how 400 people in public service had gotten all this media attention for personal things that they were doing. Things like paying their maids under the table or cheating on their wives or these kinds of things. And this was a new thing in US political coverage; we were starting to focus on the personal failings of politicians rather than their public life.
And of course, this has gotten worse since 1992, but what's interesting for me as someone who just spent eight months investigating why things are so bad for millennials in this country is that the real scandals of Clinton's presidency were failing to pass healthcare and passing welfare reform.
Sarah: So is it not a scandal if it's not a surprise or if no one thought to keep it secret, how does that work?
Mike: This is the whole thing with journalism. Journalism only wants to cover things that are surprising, right? This is why it's hard to cover inequality. This is why it's almost impossible to cover homelessness, because it's a problem that's been around for a really long time and if you pitch an editor a story that says homeless people are people, too. They're like, well, I've read that 50 times. You can't write about these lingering social problems, you can't write about healthcare costs. Even gun stuff is really hard to write about. It takes something like Parkland, something new, like, Hey, there's teenagers that are mad about gun violence, for us to be able to talk about it, because then we can put it into the novelty frame that journalism feeds on like little larva.
So the whole problem is that there was nothing new, it was just a slow descent during his presidency and just huge, missed opportunities. You think of the fact that when he got in, he was in a deficit and then he spent all of this political capital trying to get into a budget surplus when I don't know if the economy was doing really well. Did you really have to get into a budget surplus? Couldn't you have just spent more money on like avoiding child poverty or passing a higher fucking minimum wage? There's so much stuff that they didn't do when most of what they were doing, looking back, it seems like they were trying to kowtow to Republicans in an effort to build good faith so that then they could pass their policies. I cannot get over the fact that the welfare reform is called the Personal Responsibility Act.
Sarah: I didn't know that. That's terrible.
Mike: It’s this republican framing, personal responsibility, welfare Queens, and they completely capitulated to that totally bullshit framing and reformed welfare in a way that set up the perfect ticking time bomb for the next recession, that everything was tied to work and the minute the bottom falls out of all the jobs, you can't get welfare if you can't get a job, but there's no jobs, we still have this problem today. So the fact that they didn't actually make any headway on that stuff, I feel is a bigger scandal than what he did with an intern. And is a worse abuse of power and betrayal of his constituents, than what he did with Lewinski. But those don't count because there's nothing novel in them. So much of what we weren't talking about was really important then, right? We bombed a couple of countries there. There were huge scandals happening, but they didn't seem like scandals because they weren't secrets.
Sarah: And I think we bombed a couple countries in there is such a beautiful summing up of the nineties. That's the nineties version of we didn’t start the fire.
Mike: Well remember the Daily Show called it a perversion diversion?
Sarah: I forgot about that. I was watching the daily show in 1991, but in 1999.
Mike: I think, as with all things, that capitalism is at the heart of this. Because the media economy was changing. Previously, every newspaper and every city had been a monopoly, they were just minting money because they had all these classified ads paying them bottomless sums of money. And so they could do basically anything they wanted. Journalism was one of the most profitable industries in America, something like 18% profit margins, because, if you're the main Seattle newspaper, you're the main Seattle newspaper and you don't have any meaningful competition, so you can just do whatever you want and you can charge whatever you want for a full-page ad. And you do really well.
Sarah: Which is why Meg Ryan playing a journalist in Sleepless in Seattle had the disposable income to go stalk someone for a whole week. That was a nineties economy job.
Mike: Unionization. Yeah. Yeah. And so this is the beginning of the internet era, right? Where famously Matt Drudge breaks the Clinton Lewinsky story.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah, because the Drudge Report, which is the first article about the affair between Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, is actually about how Newsweek was gonna run a story, but then it didn't. And so it essentially performs the same journalistic function as saying something in front of a jury and then a judge telling the jurors to disregard that last statement.
Mike: Or like how on real Housewives they're like, I'm not even going to point out about what your husband has been doing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Something without saying it. But the context of this is that journalists are under pressure now that for the first time newspapers have real competition. And what newspapers have to do in an era of new competition is they have to differentiate themselves. And so the way that you do that is by getting scoops, the way that you do that is by breaking news.
And so I read this fascinating description by Eve Fairbank's, a fellow Highline writer, about how she used to work for Mark Halperin, this political reporter in DC in the nineties during all of this. And she said they constructed this entire elaborate network of spies and people outside of people's houses to figure out in the year 2000 who Al Gore was going to pick as his running mate.
Sarah: Oh my God. Oh, God. What an amazing thing to put that much effort into. Is there anything that one could care about less?
Mike: But that's what's so interesting to me about this. All of the media organizations, to be the people that quote unquote broke the story of the Al Gore announcement, a couple of days before it happens is something that news organizations can get a ton of clicks from, they can get a lot of prestige from, everyone has to credit them, that if you break that story, every other outlet has to say, whoever, NBC is now reporting, blah, blah, blah. So there's all these structural incentives to start chasing after these scoops that are totally meaningless. Who cares if you get the Joe Lieberman announcement 48 hours before Al Gore is going to stand at a podium and tell everyone that anyway. It's not a meaningful piece of information.
Sarah: Men are not up late into the night and they're silk dressing gowns, because of the Joe Lieberman news leaking. I think that if no one important has to get out of bed and pace around because the story got out sooner, then they were planning on it then like why bother breaking it?
Mike: She talks about how, like they had people posted outside of Dick Gephardt's house and following Al Gore and getting leaks or like air traffic controllers and all this kind of stuff. And it's like, this is in the service of just nothing.
Sarah: Imagine following Al Gore.
Mike: I know. The most soul crushing repetitive job. But this is the direction that I think Clinton took us in because everybody wanted to get the next Lewinsky because that’s how you get readership. That's how you make a brand for yourself as a journalist, right? Because there's now this cult of personality around journalists, and for your publication. And so things like what effect is the farm bill going to have on people, or what's actually happening with maternal death rates, which were slowly rising at this point, that kind of thing isn't incentivized. And so you go from this vision of politics as public life, to this vision of politics as a facade behind which the real work is going on and the jockeying and who's up and who's down and winners and losers, and this kind of sports Game of Thrones metaphor takes over.
One thing I'm so shocked by now that I'm totally faking it as a reporter, is that when you go back and you look at stuff, all the scandals are right there, right? Rising inequality in America is in all the documents, it's in decisions that were made in public. The fact that we have no family leave, the fact that all these attempts to pass healthcare reforms have failed, that's all in public. You don't need inside sources to understand the factors that are affecting American life. And of course there are private decisions that affect those public decisions, but this whole vision of media and political reporting, as I need to find the next Lewinsky, as opposed to, I need to understand what's going on. I need to understand the effects of policies on people. That shift was really profound. And I think we didn't notice it happening at the time in the same way we did with things like soundbites.
Sarah: That reminds me of how Monica Lewinsky famously came out and repaired her image in 2014, when she wrote a Vanity Fair article, that was the first time she'd spoken out at length, spoken to the public at length, in 12 years, since she was interviewed for a HBO documentary where she was asked, how does it feel to be the blowjob queen of America, which she writes about in the Vanity Fair article?
Mike: Wait, are you serious? Somebody actually asked her that? Who? I want names.
Sarah: We're going to put them on the list underneath David Brock and Linda Tripp. In the article she just talks about an audience at a taped Q and A. We are told that it is a smirking guy.
Mike: Okay. So it's a guy in the audience, it’s not Barbara Walters.
Sarah: No, it's a smirking guy. Yeah. And she comes out with this article, and I remember the response to this being really significant at the time. And people having one of those moments of reckoning, being like, oh my God. Because what she talks about in the article is that she's had a really hard time finding jobs because people are afraid of the attention that she's going to draw from an organization that she's working with because she's considered a joke and she's going to attract paparazzi, which still happens. And that she was horribly, publicly humiliated and had suicidal thoughts and that essentially her life is destroyed.
And it's just amazing because she writes this article explaining fairly simply like, these things happen to me and my life was destroyed and the people who read it were like, oh my God, if you do that to someone, you destroy their life. And it's like, yeah, why were we confused about that point?
Mike: We always have to be reminded that people are people. I feel like we always go through this thing of pillorying somebody, and there's these internet pylons, and then six months or a year or something later, they write a thing that's like, I'm a person that hurt me and were like, oh, you are a person. And then on the next one, we're like this fucking skank. We never actually internalize that. Or like, Hey, let's all slow down guys. It's always like, oh, that last one was bad, but like this next one.
Mike: Yeah. And so one of the things that Monica Lewinsky talks about in this article, and one of the reasons that she cites for having come forward to use the parlance of our journalistic shorthand is that she talks about how we're now in this internet facilitated public shaming cycle. And what happened to her is now happening, and is now more of a pillar of our culture even than it was then and I agree with that. And it seems as if we're at a point where someone can be publicly shamed for a day and then the next day be like actually mitigating evidence, blah, blah, blah. And then there might be a little bit of like, oh, huh. But it's not as if their image gets repaired or they get really apologized to or anything. It's shaking a prey animal and being like, ah, this feels basically dead already and dropping it and moving on to the next thing.
What that makes me think of is this woman, someone who took a photo of her looking at her phone while her very young infant was lying on a blanket in a departure terminal of an airport. And it was posted and immediately went viral, and the tone was, this mother is looking at her phone and not at her baby and this is a symptom of everything that's wrong with our technologic and et cetera. And it's interesting, right? Because there's something oddly unself-aware about using the internet to shame someone for being addicted to the internet. And then the woman speaks out and is like, I had been awake for about 20 hours and my flights had been canceled and I was looking briefly away from my baby who was stretched out, sleeping peacefully on her blanket so that I could try and get a flight back to Australia or wherever. So, yeah. We're told context, and we're like, oh right, context. And then the next thing happens, and we overreact until we’re sometimes reminded. And it's accelerated to such a pace that you would really think we would experience more burnout with it at this point, but we're maintaining it.
Mike: I think the weirdest thing about this and the weirdest thing about reading her Vanity Fair piece was the weird fixation on blowjobs.
Sarah: Same thing that happened to Linda Lovelace. You just can't come back from it.
Mike: And there's, I think she mentioned in the Vanity Fair article that there was some commentator on TV at the time who said like, oh, I'd ask her for a comment, but her mouth is too full. Or some terrible comment when like, are there adult women who have not given blow jobs? That's such a weird dig at somebody else. I just assume that every adult woman and every adult gay man that I've ever met has at one point given a blow job. It's like finding out that Barack Obama goes to the bathroom. I don't want to think about it, but I know that it happens. I don't need to focus on it, but it's just a weird dig to basically be like, ooh, she gave a blow job. This is what adults do. I don't give a shit that she gave somebody a blow down, giving somebody a blow job means nothing about you.
Sarah: That reminds me of how I really enjoy the blow jobs in gay porn and specifically vintage gay porn, like from the seventies, because the guys are often wearing wedding rings and you're like, what is your life like? You know? And the attitude that I bring to watching straight porn is like, okay, am I watching someone who's capable of being consenting right now. If you're watching a blowjob in the context of straight porn, it, I feel like you're often thinking about like, what's the power dynamics of this? What is this woman surrendering? What kind of psychic damage is she putting herself through? What is she getting back in exchange? Is it worth it? It's hard to get turned on while you're doing all that. And that's all a very roundabout way to say that a) everyone should try and watch some gay porn if they want to, and that b) straight women really have a hard time talking about blow jobs, oral sex, historically, without conceptualizing it as somebody wins and somebody loses. And nobody wins unless somebody loses. And this idea of the woman who gives blow jobs is like she's…
Mike: She’s giving up something.
Sarah: Yeah. And that there's not a model for enthusiastic consent or this idea that this is a sexual act that people do because they enjoy it. To be the woman who famously gives a blow job is to be in a way a betrayer of women. And it's not as if feminists would have stood up and cheered if her receiving oral sex had been a significant part of scandal.
Mike: Although it is notable that he never even offered.
Sarah: That’s a bummer.
Mike: In all the Starr report stuff, he never seemed to care all that much about her pleasure. It was always about servicing him. That was always his primary motive.
Sarah: And if we were really concerned about sexual reciprocity, we would have talked about that more at the time. And I don't recall there being conversations about it. What I do know, and this has probably shaped my sexuality in ways that are obvious from this conversation, is that I learned what oral sex was from hearing radio DJ jokes about the scandal. I was in the car with my mom and there was some sort of contrasting thing of like 32% of American eighth graders know that Albany is the capital of New York, but 74% know that Monica Lewinsky performed oral sex on Bill Clinton. And I was like, mom, what's oral sex. And then she didn't have to, but she explained what it was. God bless her. But as a kid, I think I just have the sense of like, I don't know what we're supposed to know about the president. I've never had another president before that I can remember. I guess this is how that works. I don't know what I think about it either. I don't know if I think it shouldn't have happened to the extent that it did, I don't know. Cause all I know is that that's like that's the political world that I grew up in.
Mike: Yeah. You always think that the default version of the world is how it was when you were like from 12 to 18. All this like make America great again, shit is all about, everyone thinks that the normal state of affairs is when they were in high school. That the country was normal. No matter whether you're in Zimbabwe under Mugabe or America under Clinton, you just think, oh, this is the normal thing. And I think for us, that was just the normal thing. And we think of that as the default and then everything else past that is somehow a deviation from the default.
Sarah: I know that Monica Lewinsky has claimed the identity of Monica Lewinsky in the last few years, which is an interesting thing to watch. And I found this New York Post article talking about how Monica Lewinsky should just go away. This came out right after her article came out. And what's interesting about this is that there's just no argument to it. It's all just an attack on her based on the fact that she's Monica Lewinsky. There's one reference to her saying, clearly she just wants a paycheck and she's only doing this now because she feels there's money in it. And, okay, yeah, that's a standard issue argument event against someone talking about something painful, but that's it. And one of the other closing statements is that it seems that nothing will stop Lewinsky from making a big Lewinsky of herself. Yeah. What does that mean though? You're just calling her by her name.
Mike: I don’t know. I think if Monica Lewinsky decides to become a professional victim and talk about bullying and online lack of proportionality, I think that's actually fine. And she's an expert on it because she lived through it, and no one ever applies this lens ever to men. This douchebag who got fired from Google for writing this inane memo, who's 100% making a career out of this. And that's fine. It's a free country. He can write op-eds for various places and get hired as a commentator on Fox News on men and women's like incel relations, have a blast, man, but nobody ever cast aspersions on that when men do it, it's only when women in any way might have a profit motive for anything that everybody seems to think that that somehow invalidates it, when maybe Monica Lewinsky does want to get rich, and she wants to get more attention on internet teasing. Those two things are fine. I don't mind that like ambition, I think many people probably have that ambition.
Sarah: Well, women are not allowed to want money.
Mike: Yeah. And when men do it, it's like a virtue, right? It's this capitalist conquering spirit thing. And when women want to do it, it's always avaricious.
Sarah: Because women aren't supposed to have money. And one of the things that Monica Lewinsky said in the interview with Barbara Walters, Barbara Walters talks about how Monica, when she was 18, had a relationship with a married man. And she's like, can you talk about that? And just the skew of it obviously is she can't stop having relationships with married men, et cetera.
And Monica Lewinsky has this wonderful, composed answer about how, regardless of the circumstances surrounding her relationship with someone who was married to someone else, what it did bring her was basically self-esteem and self-love and acceptance and appreciation of her sensuality, not backing down. She would not claim that she was anything other than a woman who was in touch with her sexuality and liked having sex.
Mike: Do you think of her as a victim?
Sarah: Well, I think of her as a victim of the public.
Mike: But not of Bill?
Sarah: No. If we were to call up Monica Lewinsky today and say, how do you feel about it at this minute looking back? And if she were to either say, I feel like a victim, or no, I don't feel like a victim. I think both of those answers would make complete sense. Because you can look at this collection of variables and ages and positions, et cetera, and say that they correlate to abuse or not. But I think if you're talking about a relationship between two adults, we're not qualified to say.
Mike: There's this fascinating study in Sweden years back that I can't stop thinking about where, you know how when you write a dictionary, you try to write down every single word that people use very systematically. This study tried to write down every reason that people have sex. They did a survey of like 20,000 people and they say, well, why have you had sex in your life? And they got 183 answers. And obviously it's like, because I was attracted and because I'm in love and kind of the standard answers, but then there's stuff like I wanted to settle a bet. I wanted to get back at somebody. I wanted to see what it would feel like. And not all of them were virtuous answers. Many of them were horrifying. But there are many more than 183 reasons that people get into relationships with each other.
Sarah: Let's talk about what we learned today, or I'll talk about what I learned today. It's interesting because no one set out to raise us in a cultural or political climate that would make us distrust everyone and everything, but I do think that we ended up with pretty good circumstances for that, if somebody were trying to create that. The worry at the time was that we would all be frivolous and traumatized and violent and materialistic, and we certainly are living in a…
Mike: Sarah, we are. We are all, all those predictions happened.
Sarah: Yeah, we are. But what if we're violent and materialistic and skeptical, what if at the bottom of Pandora's box of media, there's a little MIPI thing and it's skepticism. What if we can have that?
Mike: First of all, horrifying that you think there are any advantages to being a millennial. I want to reject that outright, thank you though. My main thing that I've learned is that I really hate the word ejaculate, which we have now said three episodes in a row, which is more times than I've said that word in the last 13 years. And I never want to say it again. That is my bigger revelation.
Sarah: We've got Jonestown coming up, so I really can't make any promises.
Mike: I want to end with something that has been nagging me about the Clinton Impeachment for like 20,000 years, however long it's been. There's always this thing that we always talk about that Clinton is such a fucking weasel that he questioned, well, it depends on what the definition of is, is. I just want to say that's bullshit and that is like the primary, You’re wrong about. So in the grand jury testimony, Clinton makes a statement, there is nothing going on between us. Later on, in a further deposition, people are saying, well, you lied when you said there is nothing going on between us. And Clinton says, well, at that time, there was nothing going on between us. There had been something going on between us previously. So when I said there's nothing going on between us, I meant the current time. I'm talking about the now is, versus the previous is, and that's actually an okay claim to make.
Sarah: It is. He's talking about tenses.
Mike: He's talking about tenses. And so to say, oh, he's such a weasel. He's saying the definition of the word is, well, yeah. They're questioning his claim that by saying there's nothing going on between us, he's lying. When in fact in the current time there was nothing going on between them because he was testifying about her at the time.
Sarah: We want to latch on to Bill Clinton being weasley in other ways.
Mike: Which he is.
Sarah: Yeah. Which she is fine, but we just don't have a signifier for that so we kind of invent one.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. So this is the only thing on which I will defend William Jefferson Clinton. It's this one tiny thing. In every other way he kind of sucks.