112: Primary Colors (1998) and other discussions...
So, Daniel and Jack recorded a bonus episode on 1998's Primary Colors (the Mike Nichols movie, written by Elaine May, starring John Travolta and Emma Thompson, based on the originally Anonymous roman-à-clef about the 1992 Bill Clinton primary campaign) for their Patreon contributors... and, as the discussion ranged widely, it somehow turned into something they wanted to release on the main feed. Content Warnings Become a backer of Daniel or Jack to get exclusive access to a new bonus episode. Becoming a patron also brings access to all other bonus episodes. At least one new Patreon exclusive bonus episode every month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
Hello, Jack here, welcoming you to I Don't Speak German episode 112.
This is just a little introductory note to explain what's going on.
This was originally recorded as a Patreon backer bonus episode, but when we re-listened to it we decided that...
It would be appropriate to release it as a mainline episode for everybody, especially given the fact that as I sat down to edit it, the news came through that the Supreme Court in the United States had struck down Roe v. Wade.
This episode isn't specifically about Roe v. Wade or the issues about it, but we feel, nonetheless, that this is relevant.
We hope you enjoy it and get something out of it.
Take care, everybody.
This is I Don't Speak German.
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe spaces.
In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
This is bonus 17, I think. I think.
Bonus 17.
I'll take your word for it.
Bonus 17.
There it is.
That's a fact.
And this is just for you, paying customers.
Thank you so much for your money.
Until we release it six months later, but yeah, sure.
Until we release it, yeah.
We just gave the non-payers downfall, which you had ages ago.
It's not just yours anymore, but you had it all to yourself for a long time, so I think that's good enough, you ungrateful bastards.
It's for the paying customers, because that's how I think of the audience.
It's just customers, right?
Yeah, that's right.
That's when we monetize so heavily, the things that we do.
But it's not only for the paying customers, but also for the rabble, for the untamed masses to suddenly get to absorb.
That's right, the unwashed peons, yeah.
Every now and again when I'm feeling depressed, I go and look at comments, you know, on our podcast on various platforms, you know, Stitcher and Spotify and so on, and I look down and, you know, there's all the usual ones like, you know, oh, that British guy's really smug and SJW cucks and groomers and all that sort of usual stuff.
Oh, and the stuff that lots of people that that's which that's totally on my end, just to be clear.
That's not true.
But there was one.
So I can't remember where it was, but there was one I saw where they said, oh, it's all paywall now.
I think what it's not.
What the fuck is that even like?
I don't read the reviews because I couldn't do this work and do the read the reviews.
Like, you know, I kind of have to have a certain amount of just independence and confidence in terms of like my ability to understand what's going on.
Not that I don't care what people want to hear and not that I don't care what people are saying, but I just can't.
I just I know my creative process just will not allow me to absorb that, at least for this project.
It's all paywall now is like the wrongest like it's the all the important shit is free, you know, like, you know, yeah.
Yeah, that's why it made me laugh, you know, because it's completely bass ackwards.
And I couldn't tell if it was coming from the right or the left because it could have been like some very idealistic young anarchist who was outraged by the fact that we now have Patreon only episodes, you know, sort of somehow.
They've got themselves worked up to think, oh, it's all behind a paywall now, they're sellouts, capitalist sellouts, or it could have been from the right, you know, just lying.
That's what I like about it.
It's a sort of trolling news comment.
It's literally give one or the other of us a dollar a month, which is the minimum amount that Patreon allows you to give, you know, and you get access to the full catalog.
I mean, it's a paywall.
I hate that we have this, but it actually does increase the subscribers by just giving people anything at all.
If that works, then that's fine.
I shouldn't say this as like a good capitalist or whatever.
I'm not a good capitalist, but I shouldn't say this, but like, look, if you literally can't afford a dollar a month, I will send you the episodes.
It's fine.
Like, you know, like it doesn't matter to me, you know, I would rather you listen and get enjoyment out of it and spread it than otherwise, but it actually does.
Like when we did start doing paywall episodes, like I think both of our patrons went up by, you know, 20% or whatever.
And that, you know, considering that this is a good percentage of our income, that makes a difference.
You know, the most boring thing for any Patreon subscriber is listening to us talk about our Patreon subscribers.
But, you know, like it is, it is like we, you know, like, I don't know, like that's just ridiculous to me.
It's silly.
But I liked it anyway.
Yeah, no, but yeah, yeah, it's funny.
It's funny.
So yeah, here you are behind the paywall.
Yeah, where we continually just talk about like movies from the 90s because the Patreon is now Daniel and Jack relitigate the 90s American cinema, which I could do this forever, but I feel like maybe we should move away from it for the next Well, we're both 90s kids, you know.
to be clear and try to move on into something else.
But we have been talking a lot about 90s movies and we're doing that again.
And we're talking about- - Well, we're both 90s kids, you know, it's, and most people doing podcasts are white men of roughly our age who were 90s kids and they do talk about 90s movies.
So our paywall bonus backer only episodes are just like every other podcast on the end.
Except, of course, that they're done by us, so they're better.
Yeah, yeah.
No, no, that's clearly, clearly.
Did you listen to INA's after show, episode number two, by chance?
Was that the... I listened to the one with Andy Kindler.
Andy Kindler was the first one, and then the second one was two young women who were patrons of hers.
I haven't gone to that yet.
Yeah.
Well, they had very nice things to say about us for about 45 seconds.
I'd love to seek that out, because it's very rare that a woman of any age, let alone a young woman, says anything nice about me, so I must hear this.
I won't say young.
Maybe I said young earlier, but very lovely, very young, very lovely people who were intelligent and insightful.
And then also I kind of really stuck their foot in the mud by giving us praise.
But other than that, it was fine.
Other than that, it was brilliant commentary.
So yeah, go subscribe.
Yeah, go subscribe to AIDA's Patreon.
Yeah, do that, because AIDA is awesome.
Yep.
Anyway, Primary Colors, that's what we're here to talk about.
Primary, yeah.
Or should I say Primary Colors because of the inaccurate way you Americans spell things.
Yeah, well, you know, I was going to have a... Butcher the Queen's English.
Yeah, well, that's what we do.
We, you know, it's just ultimately, you know, we just butcher everything, you know, particularly language.
So yeah, Primary Colors, 1998.
Which is effectively a romantic laugh about the Clinton presidency.
The film is directed by the legendary Mike Nichols, written by the legendary Elaine May, and it's based upon the novel Primary Colors, which was published anonymously originally.
And it turned out, and I think a lot of people knew right from the start, although he denied it, but it turned out to have been written by Joe Klein, didn't it?
Yeah.
And he admitted it a few months later or whatever.
But yeah, it was published in 96, the book was.
During the 1996 presidential election, Bill Clinton's re-election.
But it is about, you know, sort of, you know, the veiled story of the like the real insider story of the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign during the primaries, during the Democratic primaries.
And yeah, you see, this is the thing because I was aware of this, but I'd never really I'd never read it or seen the film until you suggested doing it for this.
So I saw the film for the first time literally a couple of days ago.
And I sort of had it in my head that it was written by PJ O'Rourke somehow.
I don't know how I got that idea.
That is a completely reasonable assumption.
And if you don't know who PJ O'Rourke is, go back to your TikTok, I guess.
No, just count your blessings in life.
Count your blessings and enjoy the fact that you are not an old man like Jack and I are, but yes.
You probably don't even know who George Will is either, you lucky bastards.
The fact that there were SNL segments making fun of George Will talking about baseball Is the most hilarious, like, it is the most esoteric thing.
Like, how do you even explain that to someone who's 25 in 2022?
You just can't.
Yeah.
No, but yeah.
Yeah.
It's like trying to explain, I don't know, winding a cassette tape with a pencil.
You know, they don't know what either of those things are, so they have no frame of reference.
Blowing in the NES tape.
That's the, you know, the equivalent.
Yeah.
But yeah, no, I had a sort of vague idea of what this was.
So I had a vague notion that it had been written by P.J.
O'Rourke, and I didn't realize that it was as fictionalized as it is.
I thought it was actually like a faction novel, if you know what I mean, a bit like Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally, where it's told in cold blood, of course.
By Truman Capote, where it's told like a novel, in the style of a novel, but all the names are the real names and the facts.
So I thought it was actually about the Clintons directly.
Yeah.
When I finally watched the movie, I was a little bit surprised.
I was like, who's this Stanton guy?
Who's this?
It confused me deeply.
It foxed me.
I couldn't work this out.
I couldn't work out what was happening.
Not even after John Travolta opened his mouth and did his Bill Clinton impression.
I was still confused.
Which, you know, I think we were talking about this in one of our group chats, and it was like, yeah, this is still probably one of John Travolta's great roles, which kind of speaks to John Travolta's career in some ways.
Not kind to John Travolta.
But, you know, it's a thing.
When he's good, he's good.
And he's good in at least four places here, I think.
So, you know.
Yeah, no, this is not like a, in any sense, a sort of like direct retelling of the Clinton primaries.
It's more a sort of taking the general concept of a person like Bill Clinton and sort of like retelling it in this kind of insidery way.
And that was kind of the big story because what I remember is like, I was 12 years old in 1992.
And I remember kind of, like, following the presidential primaries in 1992 as a 12-year-old through, like, reading Time Magazine, you know?
And that's how you grow up to be a podcast host.
And that's actually, when we talk about the origin story of I Don't Speak German, when we talk about the Daniel Harper origin story, that's A really big piece, like in that, you know, my first memories politically were following the 1992 campaign and being a giant, again, at 12 years old, Ross Perot supporter.
Which is about the only age at which that's, you know, forgivable.
Completely forgivable at 12 years old.
He had graphs, you understand.
Clearly he knew things.
Um, you know, he was, he was a novelty, wasn't he?
He was just, he wasn't.
Yeah.
And the shame is, and the shame is that like Sam Harris uses that same, uh, political philosophy in 2022 at 60 or whatever Sam Harris is.
It's like, there are numbers.
This person produces numbers and therefore must be a political genius.
No, that's not actually how it works.
Scientific data can't be racist.
Could also talk about Nate Silver, if we wanted to, to get into that, but we have other things to talk about, namely primary color.
So anyway, this was a huge story in 1996 when, you know, four years later, when the book came out, it was also like heavily talked about in those circles.
And I was still kind of reading, you know, those kinds of political magazines.
There was no internet.
I mean, the internet existed at that point, but there was no like political internet in the way that we know it now.
And so like, Everything kind of comes down to just reading magazines and newspapers, which I was doing pretty regularly when I was a teenager at that point.
This was a huge bit of buzz.
It's like, who wrote this?
Who did this?
This is this big insidery account.
It has a whole bunch of juicy details.
I was going to read the book.
I read about a third of the book just to sort of compare it to the movie.
It tracks the movie very closely in at least its first third.
So maybe like after that, it kind of like veers off.
Just taking the movie as sort of an accurate representation, which may be unfair, but this has absolutely nothing to do with the 1992 primaries, to be clear, beyond the fact that there is a governor of a southern state with an intellectually pedigreed wife And he's fooling around and she's kind of trying to exert some influence on the campaign.
And some of the kind of individual figures are very kind of accurate to real life.
But, you know, once you get past, like, the first third of the movie, like, none of this has any, you know, real, like, none of the, like, political things in it have any kind of real valence to the real world beyond, like, this very superficial level.
And so, I guess just to bring it back to the movie, and to try to keep this podcast episode to a manageable length, and not to force you into a certain, into guide rails.
What did you think of the film?
What are your general thoughts?
I thought you had obviously seen this, but the fact that you hadn't until two days ago kind of fascinates me.
What are your thoughts?
you know, on the film, like kind of as a film or kind of however you want to go.
I just, I'm just curious, like what's your kind of like two minute, like thoughts of the film.
Okay.
Well, the first thing is of course, relevant to what we've been talking about a little bit already is just, I was watching this and despite the fact that I've never seen it before, watching it to watch it for me was to just experience this gigantic rush watching it to watch it for me was to just experience this You know, because it's just, it is so nineties.
It looks even down to the film stock and everything is just so, and of course it is because that's when it was made.
Everything bears the stamp of its time, you know, but this is just, Just that particular film then, the kind of film that they used in Studio Pictures then had a particular kind of feel and a particular kind of look and the colour grading and the grain of the film and everything just conspired to make Because I was 16 in 1992.
The 90s were like my teenage years.
I mean, this was released in 98, you said, so yeah.
That's the point in time when I was turning into a young man and I was watching a huge amount of movies then, more than I do now.
Bashed in the face with nostalgia for youth, you know?
And I'm not actually somebody who's usually given to that sort of thing.
I'm not one of these people that sits around thinking, oh, the days of my youth.
I couldn't give a fuck, basically.
But it was kind of, wow.
I think maybe even more so because I'd never seen it before.
It didn't really happen when I watched The Fugitive.
For our last bonus episode.
And I think just, even though The Fugitive is just an incredibly 90s movie as well.
And of course, on some level, I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, oh yeah, the 90s, yeah, that's what it looked like, the 90s.
But it wasn't, whereas this, as I say, I'm watching it for the first time, so to me it's a new movie.
But it's like, I suppose it felt like watching a new movie in 1998, if you know what I mean.
So it kind of affected me more.
Yeah.
Well, I feel like, I feel like Primary Colors has this, like, it's this weird time capsule in which we just don't make movies like that anymore, at least for the big screen.
Um, and kind of what happened after, uh, after 2000 is like sort of the HBO... Yeah, all this stuff's on television now.
Anything like that is just on TV now.
Well, HBO literally makes like, you know, a few years later of some political event, they make like Game Change, I think was 2004 or something.
And that's like HBO retelling the story of the Sarah Palin selection as the vice presidential candidate for John McCain.
And this is all like very kind of like taken directly from headlines at the time and taken from like direct journalistic accounts.
And, you know, in this like very sort of like straightforward way telling that story.
And they've just kind of like in regardless of how you feel about those films, which I think, you know, they're If Jack wants to do a side podcast just talking about HBO films about American electoralism, I'm game.
If anyone wants to do that, I would absolutely do that.
I am fascinated by it, probably because I was 12 years old and following the Democratic primaries.
I am fascinated by American presidential politics.
I find it enormously entertaining.
It's sick.
It's a sick fascination for me.
You should treat that with no more reverence than you would if I said I was really Really interested in and redacted terrible thing.
I'm not even going to tell the joke of what the terrible thing is.
Just name your terrible thing.
I make Warhammer 4k miniatures out of cat shit.
That would be equal to following American electoral politics on the presidential level.
Anyway, Uh, but, uh, you know, I find that, uh, the, you know, that those movies have kind of like taken some of the air out of this sort of thing, because like, honestly, like those, because they're produced for HBO for a paying, you know, subscriber base can just sort of like get to the brass tacks.
They're not like interested in appealing to like the widest possible audience that any like kind of big Hollywood production has to.
And they can be made on kind of shorter timeframes.
And ultimately, comparing one of those to primary colors, primary colors is constantly kind of like pulling its punches.
Like there's no real political valence to this in like an explicit way is something that I find interesting and sort of like revisiting it.
Because when I saw this, I would have seen this probably on a page cable channel in like 2000 or 2002 or something, you know, around that time period.
I did not see this theatrically.
I would have caught it, you know, just on TV late at night.
It would have been something that just came on and I watched.
And at the time, it felt like it's this really interesting conversation around how do we feel about someone who is flawed on a personal level, but maybe has this profound political ability and this policy wonkishness, which is what the movie wants you to feel about it, ultimately.
And which I kind of fell for Pretty readily, because I think there's a there's a real filmmaking prowess at stake here.
I mean, there's this kind of, I think, great, I mean, great moment in the film, you know, in terms of, you know, in terms of its directorial style and writing, et cetera, you know, in which we have been on the inside of this, like, campaign argument.
And then our lead, which we haven't even talked about the characters in the movie, but our lead, Henry Burton, stares out the window to a Krispy Kreme, which is lit in this, like, almost, like, film noir style in this, like, very, like, neon lights everywhere.
At the end of that sequence, it directly references Hopper's painting, Nighthawks, as every movie representation of people at night in a bar has to do, by law, I'm given to understand.
And we learned that Jack Stanton, who should have by all rights been inside arguing about political maneuvering, is actually sitting and having just a really good conversation with this man who is working in the late night shift at the donut shop, who works his ass off, you understand, who works like every day, hours a day, and who
You know, and I do not say this lightly, but it's clearly something that's implied by the film has mental disabilities, like that's that's clearly indicated by the film.
But he doesn't mind it because he just wants to work.
And Jack Stanton, He's just sitting there having a nice conversation with this guy instead of being involved in the deeper political discussions of the people outside of this.
And this is portrayed as Jack Stanton being this exquisite Man, who deserves to be the President of the United States.
I don't know, am I overestimating, am I overstating the quality of this sequence, you know, in terms of what it's really trying to say about Stanton?
I don't think so.
I mean, in either meaning of the word, That word quality, it's very well, that wonderful pan out of the window, slow pan towards the Krispy Kreme and the way the sound mix gradually changes so that the sounds of the people in the room arguing gradually are superseded by the distant sound of Stanton in the Krispy Kreme chatting with the guy behind the counter, etc, until suddenly, you know, off camera, obviously round the back of the camera, so to speak, Henry walks into the Krispy Kreme having obviously abandoned the, yeah, it's really well done.
And in the other sense, quality, I think your description of what the film is trying to put across about Stanton is absolutely correct, yeah.
I think that's what it's getting at.
I think it's getting at the idea that he's kind of maybe a bit selfish and even feckless, you know, because he's kind of abandoned the people in the room to do the work for him.
But at the same time, there's a guy with a genuine concern and a genuine warmth for working people there, you know.
I think that is what the film is trying to say, yeah.
Yeah, and like in the loop, it has this sort of, you know, it has this sort of, which we discussed in our previous episode, so go back and look in the archives, but like in the loop, it has this sort of like of a sort of a like a wise cynicism, right?
In terms of like looking at, you know, we are political professionals, right?
We come in, we work for a candidate, Some of them we believe in, some of them we don't.
But we have a certain set of skills we bring to this thing.
And when we lose, we lose.
And when we win, we win.
And ultimately, we just move on to the next guy because that's what our job is.
But then they believe Stanton is the real thing.
And Stanton is Clinton.
There's really no distance between them in terms of what the character of this person is supposed to be.
Um, in terms of the film, I mean, Travolta is doing a Clinton impersonation.
Now, I think there are places where that gets a little bit more interesting and complicated in terms of some of the like, like childlike responses.
For instance, when he, you know, walks into that, like, you know, cheap hotel room that first time and he just starts like, you know, fumbling with the blinds and doing that sort of thing.
Um, this is not something that we've ever seen, you know, like, you know, this does not like, this is not.
Speak to the sort of like the persona of Bill Clinton as we've seen him like portrayed in other reporting, right?
So this feels like this kind of like something that maybe kind of comes from a more authentic, you know, kind of actor's place in terms of Travolta trying to find the character.
But, you know, ultimately, that is very thin gruel in terms of trying to pretend that Stanton is not Clinton.
You know, this is this is this is very much Bill Clinton, you know.
The interesting thing to me about this film is how little actual politics there is in it in terms of content.
It's all just process.
And we are repeatedly told, or at least we are repeatedly invited to watch characters Who apparently believe what they're saying, talk about Stanton as, you know, something different.
This guy means it, this guy's for real, this guy, you know, and that seems to really be the entirety of his politics, at least as far as the people around him are concerned.
You know, his great sort of inspirational political meaning as a figure And his program and his ideology and his policies and everything seems to just boil down to, no, he actually cares about people.
And it's amazing how resistant that perception is on the part of the characters to evidence.
Like, Henry is shown repeatedly that that's not true.
I mean, it's literally, it's literally like the third scene in the movie, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's the Uncle Charlie thing or whatever.
No, no, no.
It's the Uncle Charlie thing.
Not to interrupt, but like, yeah.
The first thing that we are presented with is Jack Stanton is doing this politically useless conversation.
He's doing a meeting with this group of adult literacy people.
It's a bunch of people who are learning how to read in this big library, right?
And it's this tiny program.
It has no, like, political advantage.
There's no, like, media present.
It's dead in the water.
Like, why would any person trying to run for president do this?
And we're told by the, like, wizened, like, political guy speaking to our kind of our viewpoint character, Henry Burton, who Is a stand-in for George Stephanopoulos.
And just as an aside, if you notice that Henry Burton, as a character, is the grandson of a black radical from the 60s who has worked within African-American campaigns and who has become disaffected from losing all the time.
Is not exactly the life story of George Stephanopoulos and was not even in 1998.
You have put a pinpoint.
Henry is supposed to be the stand-in for George Stephanopoulos.
Yes, that is.
I don't see that at all.
No, no, no.
It's a complete, this is, I mean, this is like this kind of fundamental twisting of reality that we see in which like our viewpoint character is like in this, I mean, you know, like on paper, at least this sort of like kind of morally above it all kind of guy who has a real like pedigree in terms of his father and grandfather are, you know, He has worked in these kind of political campaigns.
He has worked for years in doing this.
And now he's just looking for somebody who's going to get shit done.
And Stanton fulfills that, but also fulfills this.
He believes it.
He believes in everything that we do, but he lies about it in order to get elected.
That's sort of the message that we hear from Burton about Stanton.
Pretty much in the dialogue at one point.
That's text in the movie.
And God, we could go through this scene by scene.
We are not going to do that, of course, because I'm not prepared to do that.
But I watched this three times for this podcast, and I found bullshit everywhere.
It's just everywhere.
And I still quite like the movie.
That's the thing.
I'm like, yeah, no, it's a fun movie.
Go watch it.
Just don't think about 1992.
Ever, you know, in response.
But yeah, no, Henry Burton, in terms of his placement within this campaign, he holds the role of George Stephanopoulos.
And why would Joe Klein choose to change the characteristics of George Stephanopoulos to this degree?
Well, well, this tells you just how much bullshit is actually involved in terms of this narrative, right?
And the book just kind of like follows along for that.
So yeah, no, that's a very kind of clear thing that's been changed.
That's one of, and basically again, everything after like the first third has no like, you know, all the maneuvering and that sort of like last two thirds of it.
It has no direct counterpart.
In fact, even if you look at the Wikipedia page for the novel, it's like, well, who is Freddie Picker?
You know, who does he represent?
And it's like, well, it's Sherry Brown and Reuben Eskew and Harold Hughes and Ross Perot.
It's all four of these guys in one character.
And it's like, no, it's not.
There's no there's no comparison there.
Like, that's not that's not what this is.
You know, that's that's one of many questions that I, you know, I sort of I know I know you little you know more about this than I do.
So I do have sort of I have lots of headings here with question marks next to them.
No, none of this is real.
None of this is real.
No, I didn't think so.
I've got Hagman.
None of this is real.
None of this is real.
No, I didn't think so.
Yeah.
No, no.
I've got Hagman.
By the way, brilliant performance.
It just goes to show what a fine actor Larry Hagman was.
Phenomenal.
I mean, it's phenomenal all the way down when, like, Tony Shalhoub is, like, number 30 on your cast list.
I mean, even in 1998, that's a really strong cast.
Like, although he's playing, like, you know, Cuban immigrant and, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was probably a little bit more believable when we didn't know Tony Shalhoub and who he was, you know?
It's a great performance, but, you know, it's a thing.
He's always great, yeah.
But no, I mean, I've got this, like, you know, Hagman, great performance.
Who is Picker?
Question mark, question mark, question mark.
Can I ask, Sure, go ahead.
I kind of assumed that the Billy Bob Thornton character is supposed to be James Carville, is that right?
Oh yeah, it's very James Carville.
Now, to my knowledge, there is no allegation that James Carville ever pulled his dick out to a lesbian staffer.
Another question.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And to my knowledge, there's no, there's no, there's no indication that that happened, but like, and I apologize.
I mean, look, we're in the, we're in the presence of friends here on our Patreon subscribers, you know?
I don't like to use this kind of language, but James Carville, you know, when the allegations against when like, you know, Jennifer Flowers came out and like accused him of sexual assault or, At least sexual impropriety, however you want to define it.
I'm not here to relitigate that.
We're not here for that.
But when that stuff comes out, James Carville's line that he would literally go on CNN and say is, The Republicans are just drawing a $100 bill on a string through a trailer park and bringing up every fucking floozy who would say a bad word about the perfect man, Bill Clinton.
Look, if you're in electoral politics and your job is to get your guy elected, this is what you do.
This is the reality of your job.
It's not even like, I mean, it is a moral question because that is despicable, of course, but, you know, It's built into the system, ultimately.
This is what electoral politics is about.
Well, our guy is going to be better than the other guy, and therefore, we just smear these women, regardless of the quality of what they're having to say, with this thing in the media, because ultimately, we're powerful and they're not.
And that's what you do.
And that's what a political operative is just going to do for their candidate.
Period.
You know, Stephanopoulos is up to his neck in that as well.
Carville is a fucking lowlife, but Stephanopoulos is supposed to have referred to Jennifer Flowers as our first bimbo avalanche or bimbo apocalypse or something like that.
And the way, I mean, as you say, we're not going to Relitigate the whole sort of Clinton sex scandal thing.
I would be happy to discuss this in another place when I've done my research on this, you know.
And oh, by the way, I'm just going to put this here.
Juanita Broderick was almost certainly raped by Bill Clinton.
Like, I mean, the evidence was almost certainly sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton.
Yeah.
I mean, I would draw, I would say, like, look, even if you're a powerful political figure, there is at least an argument to be said for, you know, consensual adult relationships, you know.
And I think there are some of these relationships that feel that, you know, to me.
But there are others that, you know, I think Juanita Broderick was in 1978, like when he was governor of Arkansas.
It's despicable, despicable behavior.
Yeah, I agree.
Yeah.
And it's an irony, isn't it?
That the scumbag David Brock for the American Spectator, I think it was, the far right magazine, he was the muckraker for...
He's the one that leads the assault against Anita Hill when she very credibly alleges sexual harassment from Clarence Thomas, who's in the news at the moment.
Who could have seen that coming?
Because the 90s have never ended, ultimately.
Never ended, yeah.
A little bit nutty and a little bit slutty is his line, pardon me, but that's the way he introduced Anita Hill.
And, you know, I've read his book where he sort of recants his work for the right-wing smear machine in the 90s.
Blinded by the right.
Blinded by the right.
I read that in the 2000s, again, 20 years ago.
For sure, yeah.
It would be lovely to accept his Damascene conversion, but David Brock just became a scumbag for the other side.
So David Brock is just sort of obviously on some sort of existential innate level.
He's just a piece of shit.
But yeah, he ironically... I want to put a pin on this just to be clear.
The movie argues that being a piece of shit for the right side is actually fine, right?
That's what the movie is kind of ultimately arguing in some kind of larger sense.
Don't you think it's ambivalent about that?
I think it's pretty ambivalent about that.
I think when you end your movie with Henry Burton standing there shaking the hand of Jack Stanton, having just been elected President of the United States in this, like, respectful way, after knowing everything he knows, I think that, like, yeah, he made... It's ambivalent in the sense of, like, it thinks it's kind of icky to do that.
But I think it ultimately supports the overall perspective.
It's like, yeah, no.
That's interesting.
Stanton gets the big speech.
It's like, look, Lincoln did this.
FDR did this.
All the great heroes.
Kennedy did this.
All the great liberal heroes.
And liberal heroes is a, you know, look, we don't have to talk about that.
But like all of the people that you respect, all of the people who did great things in American history, within this realm, did a whole bunch of this bullshit.
And they had to because that's what they did to get elected.
That's what they had to do in order to get things done.
And they had results.
And that's ultimately the answer, you know, is Did you end things better than you didn't?
Did you actually do good with what you did?
And ultimately, all the rest is water under the bridge, because that's what you're going to be remembered for, and you've helped a whole lot of people.
I think that's the argument that the film is ultimately making.
But it's kind of like rubbing its hands about it.
It's shifting its feet.
It's kind of doing the, like, well, we don't feel great about this, but ultimately this is the argument.
That's how I see what the film is saying.
That's interesting.
Just to finish the thought, I was just remarking on the irony that David Brock, the muckraker, he actually investigated the Juanita Broderick story and decided that she was lying.
So, you know, misogyny and distrust of victims when they speak out is so strong on the right that it allows David Brock at that point in his life to say, yeah, Clinton probably didn't do this one.
Well, in the irony is that like today, I mean, at least in the 2020 cycle, what was her name?
The accuser against Joe Biden.
Tara Reid.
Tara Reid.
That's the one.
Sorry, I apologize for not remembering the name.
You understand a lot of details get lost.
It was absolutely was embraced by the right wing, you know, at the time and not in a way of like we now believe victims, but in a way of we can use this against our political opponents, you know, and I personally, I think Tara Reid was probably telling at least some version of the truth.
Um, I think, I think she was telling her story, honestly.
And, you know, the details get lost over the decades, et cetera, et cetera.
Um, and, uh, you know, if you, if you think Christine Blasey Ford's telling the truth, you should, you should think Paula Jones is probably telling the truth and you should think, uh, Tara Reid's probably telling the truth as they remember it, you know, as best they can.
Absolutely.
But also, you know, and this again gets, maybe, maybe this gets cut, but, you know, the argument that you got to see on Twitter, at least, you know, was, you know, even, you know, people talking about Tara Reid and talking about, you know, like, you know, it sounds very much like Joe Biden did some terrible shit.
you know as a powerful person and uh assaulted some people and assaulted at least one woman right um and the answer is well well Donald Trump is worse and And if you believe Tara Reade, you have to believe like a hundred people who have said similar things, much more terrible about Donald Trump, right?
By the same standards of evidence, right?
This is not to, again, to defend anyone, but to say, well, one versus a hundred, I'll take the one.
Because we're stuck in the system in which it's either one or the other, right?
That's a realistic sort of political calculation in terms of, I voted for Joe Biden.
I didn't like it.
I was not a fan.
I live in a swing state.
I voted for Joe Biden.
Um, despite believing that he very likely sexually assaulted Tara Reid, um, because there was no other, I believed it was a duty of mine, you know?
And that's kind of where we end up in, in this sort of like morass, right?
You know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you don't even have to go to, well, I mean, you should, but I'm not saying it's not important, but you don't have to go to things like that to, you know, Biden did.
Did Biden do bad things in office?
And I have been on this, I've said this like in various places, and I want to be clear about this.
This is not me saying that that a personal sexual assault of Tara Reid is forgivable, to be clear, right?
It's despicable, despicable behavior, like the worst thing that any kind of ordinary human being could ever do.
But Joe Biden is not an ordinary human being.
Joe Biden has real political power and real financial power and real like and he has for decades.
And what he has done to shore up the credit card industry in Delaware and to protect them from like tax abatements and to, you know, allow them to dig their financial claws into Americans all over the, you know, and into like really people all over the world, but certainly within the United States.
Far worse than a single claim of sexual assault.
I feel terrible even saying that, but I hope that people listen to me and hear my words.
The number of sexual assaults that through that mechanism Joe Biden has allowed or has engendered It's far greater than his personal terrible sentence, you know what I mean?
And I feel like bringing it back to the movie, the movie doesn't understand that at all, right?
The movie never gets into this in the slightest.
This is exactly what I'm trying to work around too, yeah.
Go ahead.
Just on the question of Biden personally, think about the amount of sexual assault that takes place in prison, and think about the current predicament of the United States, really, the prison industrial complex and mass incarceration.
I can't remember the exact numbers, but it's grotesque, as you've pointed out.
The United States has multiple people incarcerated.
Yeah.
Over two million Americans are incarcerated in prison right now.
Well, you can trace that right back to Joe Biden and Bill Clinton, because the 1994 Clinton Administration Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act introduces three strikes and stuff like that was drawn up for Clinton by Joe Biden.
So he's in that up to his neck.
Yeah.
And they're right there, leaving out everything else, like leaving out Clinton gutting Glass-Steagall, which sets us up for 2007-2008 and the great crash and the great recession, leaving out what the Clinton administration did to Haiti, leaving out what it did to Iraq, leaving out all this stuff.
It just, you know, just that by itself.
It guts, it just immediately, the slightest bit of actual historical material context just immediately sort of explodes this movie's pontification about, well, okay, he's not a perfect man.
He cheats on his wife and so on and so forth.
But, you know, if we get him into office, he might leave the world better than he didn't.
He manifestly did not.
He left the world much worse than he found it, as a result of the Clinton's disgusting gutting of welfare in the United States, where they destroy the old New Deal federal welfare program, and they set up TANF in its place, the disgustingly named Personal Responsibility Act 1996.
You know, super predators and welfare queens and all that.
There's a direct line between that and poverty rates in the United States skyrocketing.
So he can go to adult literacy classes and cry, and he might even really care.
He might even really care about that guy in the Krispy Kreme.
It doesn't matter.
He left the world much worse than he found it.
So the whole basis of this sort of liberal hand-wringing moral conundrum thing, it's not there.
It's fake.
The whole thing is fake, right down to the bottom.
It's based on false premises.
I mean, if I can be allowed to sort of do the liberal counter-argument, like, I don't believe this, but just go with me here for a second.
Well, you know, a second George Bush senior term would have been worse, you know, and then like, well, if a Republican had been in charge, it would have been worse.
I'm going to respond.
I agree.
Yes, absolutely.
By any measure, a Republican is worse than a Democrat.
But when you're a Democratic hero, when the person that you're relying on to be this, when this is the scope of like the left wing of our electoral politics is what Jack just described.
And, you know, I have another half dozen examples I could bring up, but, you know, there's no reason to do, you know, like, look, it's fine.
You know, like, yeah.
Terrible, terrible things.
And this was recognized at the time by, you know, progressive left-of-center, left-of-the-Democrat, you know, political groups.
This was known.
And this is actually something that's sort of hinted at in Primary Colors, in which, you know, like, Henry Burton's girlfriend has sort of gone like, yeah, Stanton.
Oh, the best character in the film by a mile, you mean?
Yeah.
Who literally, you know, she gets seen in her underwear in, like, scene four or whatever, you know?
And he says, yeah, I'll see you in a couple of hours.
Be mad at me for a couple of hours and then I'll be back.
And then he goes to run off with Stanton and he gets on a plane.
And then, like, the next time we see her, she's asking, like, you know, loaded questions about, you know, about his Vietnam history, about his, you know, about, you know, Maybe he got off easily by making a deal with the mayor of Chicago during the 1968 riots or whatever, because he had an eye towards a political career.
And then she's gone from the movie.
She's completely gone.
She never comes back.
Yeah.
She's exploited for her appearance, you know, the male gaze is employed, and she's written according to the angry black woman stereotype, but she's still by far the best character in the film because she actually has some material politics.
I would definitely pair this with Bob Roberts, which was actually made in 1992.
And yeah, I really want to see her and Giancarlo Esposito's character, you know, have a newsletter together.
Yeah.
And Louis Stuyvesant's character as well.
That's the movie I want to see, ultimately.
Yeah.
Yeah, but she gets left completely out of the movie.
It's amazing rewatching it as an adult with some degree of sophistication that I didn't have necessarily in my early 20s when I saw this the first time.
And just noticing just how much certain things just, they show up and they get dropped because to continue that narrative would be problematic.
Because if she showed up at the end of the movie, You know, like taking notes, like that would be.
That would imply some sort of comeuppance for the Stanton character.
And I think that the reality is that she has to be there to give the bona fides to Burton as someone who's with the cause, someone who has left credentials, who has a radical past, but in radical inclinations,
But ultimately, to take that seriously, on either her part or his part, would be to violate the fundamental ethic of the film, which is to embrace this certain kind of pragmatic liberalism, ultimately.
Well, that kind of gets us back to the question we were pondering before about the end.
Is it ambivalent or not?
And I think we both agree that it is ambivalent, but I think maybe I find it more ambivalent than you, because I felt the end of the movie is...
Not as good.
I'm not equating in that sense, but I felt it as something akin to the end of The Godfather, where obviously what's happening is that Michael Corleone has triumphed.
He has beaten his enemies, he's the head of the family, they're kissing the ring and calling him Godfather, and his wife has believed his lie about Not killing Carlo, et cetera, et cetera.
He's gotten away with it.
He's won.
He's at the top.
But at the same time, the movie is quite clearly telling you he's fallen.
In his ascent, he has fallen.
In his victory, he has lost, et cetera.
He has gained the world and lost his soul, that sort of classic tragic story.
And I think this film is...
I think it's getting at that.
I feel like Henry's decision, because Henry decides to abandon Stanton and then Stanton talks him round, but you don't know, and then you get the... It's almost like a...
It's almost like a horror movie.
It's like the end of the Stepford Wives, where you don't actually see what happens to Catherine Ross, and then you get the sequence in the supermarket, and then you know what happened.
That's what it's like at the end.
So it definitely has a queasiness for me.
You know, I think the film is kind of saying, yeah, Henry went along.
He went along.
And they're all happy because they won and it's all great.
But he still did disobey what he knew to be right.
I mean, I think the film goes, it's very problematic, especially now that I know that Henry is based on or sort of fulfills the narrative role of George Stephanopoulos, which is Which even in 1998 was a complicated move, or even in 96 when the book was written.
Whatever you have to say about Joe Klein as a reporter, and let's go look at old time magazine columns sometime and talk about Joe Klein as a reporter.
Whatever you think, even in 96, there was no question about who George Stephanopoulos was.
And, you know, sort of like giving his role to like this kind of character was a deliberate move in terms of, you know, like validating the Clintons and validating, you know, Bill in particular.
They're introducing this whole theme about like black experience, you know, black civil rights and American black politics, which is which is kind of not there in the reality, you know, by having this central character who is a
A black man and he and I mean one of the things I like about the movie it is funny is every time you know he's being introduced around and every time he meets a new white person they all say something like oh I admired your granddaddy or I marched with your granddaddy and he has to just sort of go Right, yeah, great.
I thought that was very funny.
I mean, Susan Stanton, the Hillary Clinton stand-in, who I hope we talk about to at least some degree in this podcast, the first time she meets him, she's like, I met you when you were eight years old or something to this effect.
You were in your underwear, jumping around in the sprinkler.
And his response is like, oh, yes, thank you.
I'm very happy to meet you, too.
And it's like, I just I like there's nothing in the performance but I'm just like Fuck you.
That is the way that you diminish anyone.
Like, oh yeah, I met you when you were eight years old.
You were dancing around in your tighty-whities in a sprinkler.
Forget the fact that this is a wealthy white woman and a black man.
Forget any of that.
If someone said that to me, You know, a, I wasn't, I mean, if someone, if someone were to like play that game, it's like, Oh yeah, I know the power play we're doing here.
And if I have to eat shit for a while in order to get the good graces, that's fine.
But this is not treated in any way.
And I read that sequence in the book and there's no context, even in the book, this is, you know, a problematic thing for anyone to say, but like.
Yeah.
It happens in the book then.
Yeah.
But it does feel very racially challenged to me.
It feels like, you know, the lady of the plantation, you know, the young black man comes around asking if there's work, you know, and she says, oh, I remember you when you were just a baby because he was her maid's kid or something like that.
That's what it felt like.
It felt very plantation, you know, very uncomfortably.
And I'm not sure that Emma Thompson is aware of this.
Emma Thompson is sort of playing this character as just very straight.
She feels very second wave feminist in terms of playing this.
Should we talk about Stanton?
Should we talk about Emma Thompson in this?
I feel like this is probably slightly out of our wheelhouse in terms of discussing various feminisms, etc.
I want to, I just want to finish my thought about the introduction of the black-white dynamic.
I was very uncomfortable at times watching this, particularly with the subplot about the young girl.
I mean, apart from the fact that we're talking about him having raped a 17-year-old.
Okay, that's what happened here.
It becomes established through the film that he had sex with a 17-year-old.
Again, this is another thing we need to talk about.
Libby The Kathy Bates character, who's kind of the conscience of the film.
She is apparently, she can cope with that, but her big breaking point, where she realizes that these people have sold out, you know, that breaks her heart to the point where she kills herself, is they're prepared to be mean about a white guy.
You know, raping the 17-year-old black girl, that I can encompass, that I can get behind, that I can put to one side.
But being mean about Larry Hagman, that's not on.
That's going to make me shoot myself.
And the whole thing where this is being written by a white guy and you have this story about a black guy who's selling out, quote unquote, his people to the point where he has to stop by the side of the road and vomit.
I just found the whole thing, like this black crisis of conscience being written by white people about white people, I just found the whole thing incredibly uncomfortable.
Oh, no, no.
Absolutely.
And I mean, there's a very deep kind of racial element in which we keep going back to that barbecue stand.
Right.
You know, which is being run by this guy who, you know, is like, you know, like the Politico show up here because this is like the best barbecue in Arkansas or whatever.
Right.
And, you know, it's this very.
Oh, my God.
Just so deeply.
Uncomfortable in the sense that it doesn't give us a sense that Fat Willy, he's called Fat Willy.
Yeah.
That Fat Willy has his own political ambitions of his own, that he might be running this operation, this barbecue stand might be serving his interests in terms of serving a community of people who are not being served.
It's all about kind of like, well, this is just a campaign stop.
This is a place where we show up or like, even worse, this is something that has been like created by Stanton as this, like Stanton's favorite place to go to eat ribs and fuck a 17 year old, you know, like, like that's, At best, this is a failure of political imagination, and at worst, this is just overt racism.
And the fact that, to my knowledge, there's no place in Arkansas, and I may be wrong about this.
I'm not deeply invested in this history.
To my knowledge, there's not some rib shop that You know, Bill Clinton would take people to in order to have like political conversations or something like that.
There's no like story there, you know.
And this doesn't exist in real life.
This was invented for the film as a way of sort of like engendering
You know, Stanton slash Clinton's, you know, sort of like bona fides within the African-American community as a way of like establishing him as like the legitimate political choice and then to tarnish him because, you know, he's doing naughty things with the girl, you know, ultimately, you know, and it's a way but but these, you know, you know, the people who are kind of being used here as political props,
Never have any kind of real agency or have any kind of real like political ideology.
There's no sense of like their place in the story and their places as people maneuvering.
And it's just, I mean, you know, again, he's depicted as kind of he's depicted as kind of, you know, like a naive man child, you know, the scene where he goes and talks with Henry about the pregnancy and stuff.
It's it's played like he's just kind of this Lumbering idiot, you know, he almost shows up with like his hat in hand, you know?
Yes.
Sitting there and just kind of holding his hat and being like, I'm not going to do the exit.
But you know what?
Yeah.
Well, Mr. Well, Mr. Stanton, you know, we we must you know, I just want you to take care of my daughter.
You understand?
I'm not trying to hurt your political career.
I just want to make sure my daughter is taken care of, you know?
But you understand, like, where, you know, sorry, I might have drifted into that slightly, because, you know, there's no way to use that language and not kind of go into that, because that's, I mean, it's... We're commenting on the fact that the film is indulging in those sorts of stereotypes.
Exactly, exactly.
The film is absolutely kind of using that as a thing.
And, you know, in any kind of real world portrayal of this kind of politics, This would, he would be a kingmaker, you know, he would know exactly who Ozio is.
He would be the one to call out like, you know, you know, Ozio's dad, you know, you know, you know, the dad is sitting there and he's going to be the keynote speaker at that thing.
And you think you're the big shot, but you're not.
And you know how I know that?
Because, uh, everybody else came through this place too, as a way of talking to you.
So, you know, go fuck yourself.
Like this would be a committed political player.
Yeah.
This trope keeps coming back as well.
This is in House of Cards.
The Kevin Spacey character in House of Cards, he has a black cook that he goes to to have down-home, straightforward conversations about life over ribs.
It's ribs again.
Ribs.
Look, I grew up in the American South.
I'm a white boy.
I grew up in the, but I grew up poor in the American South, right?
Ribs are a thing.
I'm not saying ribs aren't a thing, but barbecue, like barbecue.
That's the real thing.
Just saying.
Okay.
Just got that.
It's fine.
Sorry.
There's no way in hell I'm cutting that, Daniel.
I'm just saying, I grew up as a white boy in the South, right?
This is such New England Liberal writing this shit, too.
There's no understanding of any kind of real dynamic here as to what makes a really good barbecue restaurant.
Ribs are great, but ribs are easy, frankly.
You slow cook it, you get a good dry rub, it's fine.
That's not the really complicated shit.
It's the day-in day-out production of pulled pork barbecue.
That's the thing that actually makes your bread and butter.
And that's how you measure a great barbecue restaurant, in my opinion.
Yeah, that very well may be true, you know.
But if you're a liberal Democrat politician, a white liberal Democrat politician, the way in which you... If you're bringing a New Yorker in, you give them the place that has the good ribs, that you have the good contact with.
But as a Southern boy, if I were in that conversation, I'd be like, no, no, give me the pulled pork.
Let me taste that, that's how I know.
You see, you're making the mistake of thinking that this is about food.
This isn't.
This is about proving that you're a man of the people, and that you understand, quote-unquote, the black folks, etc., and the common people, etc.
You know, you go and you get served ribs by the black guy that you know, that you're on first name terms with, although he calls you sir, or mister, whatever, and you say, oh, these are the best damn ribs I've ever had, or Willie, or Benji, or whatever.
Yeah.
And that's how you know that you're one of the good ones.
Yeah.
And then you rape his 17-year-old daughter.
And then you rape his 17-year-old daughter.
And then he comes to you hat in hand and is like, just provide for her.
And they give him like $200,000 or something.
And it's like, oh God.
And it's disgusting.
Again, disgusting, despicable behavior, you know?
And then, you know, the movie tells us explicitly, like, you know, like, no, I was not the father, but I faced the blood test.
And so maybe I am the father.
I don't know.
It gets complicated at the end in which, like, they just keep going back and forth about, like, how terrible is Jack Stanton actually supposed to be?
You know, and this is where we haven't talked about the plot much because I don't like, If people are interested in the movie, I would like to see them just, like, watch the movie and kind of get the plot.
Like, the plot is sort of... Like, there's some good stuff there.
I think there's some good, like, movie-making there, you know?
But ultimately, it's kind of not relevant to what we want to talk about, I think.
It's well-made, yeah.
I feel like this is a theme on this show.
I say this a lot, you know, it's very well-made, but... And then I go into loads of complaining.
Yeah, I mean, well, I feel like the things that have stood the test of time enough for us to talk about them 20 years later are obviously well-made.
The complaint is not that it's not well-made, ultimately.
The complaint is that it's well-made but serving an agenda or serving an ideology or serving a worldview.
That is, you get kind of fundamentally fucked up, and that's a technical term we use in these kinds of studies.
I apologize if you didn't go to grad school, you know, to understand what fucked up means, but you know.
Yeah, it's very much of its time, as things can't help but being, but you know, that's not an excuse.
But you get the subplot about this woman, Kashmir, who's obviously supposed to be a Jennifer Flowers analogue, you know, and the film depicts her as the bimbo.
You know, and this is a thing in the discourse around the quote-unquote Clinton women, you know, the bimbo, the bimbo.
You know, at the time, it was omnipresent, and people still talk like that now.
They're maybe a little bit more circumspect about it now, some people, but it's still a thing.
You know, this sort of idea that these women, Paula Jones and Jennifer Flowers and so on, well, okay, maybe Clinton did something or other, but, you know, look at her.
She's a bimbo.
She's white trash, etc., etc.
Monica Lewinsky, she's a bit fat, you know.
I mean, the irony of the Lewinsky thing is that it seems to be one of the more consensual relationships in Bill Clinton's catalogue.
I mean, he shouldn't have done it because there's a huge age and power differential between them, but she was consenting, at least.
I mean, he was definitely using her and definitely sort of lying to her about what he intended.
But also, there was a very good podcast series, I might link it in the show notes here, that went through 20 years later, looking back at it in terms of what we know now.
You know, it seems like Clinton had a real affection for her.
Like, this wasn't, it wasn't just he was using her, it wasn't just she was lying, it was, you know, he's, I mean, look, he's president of the United States, he's the most powerful person in the world.
His wife is probably not fucking him very much for Very obvious reasons, if you know anything about them, you know, something that is sort of portrayed in the film.
And, you know, he's got a pretty 23 year old who shows up who is enamored with him.
And it feels very like chased in this weird way, like, There's no sense that he ever like touched her or gave her any kind of physical like he never groped her he never did anything like this is not a defense like this is a this is a damnation to be clear um he was serviced he did not serve her you know like there was no consent I mean there was consent but there was no um
A sense of reciprocality here, you know, in which he was also like going down on her.
It was like she was servicing him because he was the big man and she was the intern.
But also there was a real chat between them in this sort of like surreptitious, almost teenager-y way.
I mean, she seems to have had a crush on him.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
And I think that was reciprocated.
I think that's what I kind of got from some of the reporting kind of again, 20 years later, is that they would, they would like share notes with each other in which like, he was like, Yeah, I really care about you too.
And like, if I wasn't married, et cetera, you know, and, and, and it doesn't feel like this sort of like manipulative thing.
It feels like, like this like schoolboy crush that he had on his intern sort of thing.
Like, and, um, that's, The thing with talking about Lewinsky in this context is that no one involved either with the book or the movie had any understanding of Lewinsky.
And how do we know that?
Because the Lewinsky story dropped like six months after the movie was released.
And immediately made the movie completely irrelevant in terms of understanding Bill Clinton, but also made the movie like a fly in amber in terms of absolutely understanding the Bill Clinton presidency.
Because suddenly we have this idea of who do we think Bill Clinton was before Monica Lewinsky is.
And I feel like You know, having read, and maybe this comes as written by Joe Klein, etc., etc., and like from my memories of that time, and my memories of sort of the conversation around Bill Clinton from that time, it actually does sort of represent in some ways sort of the political environment that Bill Clinton came into, and sort of the promises of what like Bill Clinton might represent
I think it's hard to remember that in 1992, the idea that the redneck governor from Arkansas was going to be president of the United States.
Republicans turned their attack guns on him, not just because he was a Democrat.
They had had Democratic presidents previously.
But because he was outside of the beltway, outside of the mainstream, he had stumbled his way in, and he brought in a bunch of people from outside of that Harvard alumni sort of thing.
And, you know, he draped mud all over the Oval Office, basically, you know.
He ate fast food.
He showed up in his, like, gym shorts and his t-shirts and a ball cap, and he would sit in the Oval Office.
And, like, sign bills.
And this was just complete anathema to us.
Oh, yeah.
They hated the Clintons with a fanatical... And for no good reason!
And for, like, for no good reason.
Yeah, please continue.
For all the wrong reasons.
Yeah.
For all the wrong reasons.
Like, there's plenty of dirt on Bill and Hillary.
All the things they hated about Bill Clinton, those are the, like, yeah, no, I'm down with that.
Yeah.
Show up in your t-shirt and jeans.
You're President of the United States.
You were rightfully elected.
Sign the fucking bills.
Yeah.
And they pushed for not something as great as Medicare for All, but better than Obamacare in 1993.
If they had managed to get that passed, this world, certainly this country, but I think the world at large would be a better place by having some kind of public health infrastructure in the United States.
They pushed for that really hard and got opposed every turn.
This was good policy.
I can hate the Clintons and acknowledge this is very good policy.
I agree.
I would also say that they helped the people who sabotaged them by being exactly the kind of centrist, compromising New Democrat types that they were.
They colluded in the sabotage of their own best policies, yeah.
But yeah, they were hated and despised with a fanatical passion by the right.
And we have the whole sort of elves phenomenon, et cetera, et cetera, where Ann Coulter and all that sort of thing.
But they were hated because they were boomers, you know, and because Hillary was intellectual and a woman with a career who wore trouser suits, and they were hated because, you know, Clinton had protested the Vietnam War, because they'd been student, quote-unquote, radicals, because they'd been on the McGovern campaign.
You know, the right had this idea that they were like, you know, pot-smoking, hippie, Radicals that were gonna, you know, and of course that's complete rubbish, you know, that's complete nonsense.
But the right thought there, well, I mean, we saw it all over again with Obama.
They were well-to-do left-center Democrats who got involved with some anti-war politics in the 60s.
And look, respectable.
By itself, respectable.
We don't We don't have to be purer than thou at that point.
Yeah, great.
Good for you.
And then when they actually took political power, they did so in a way that enabled the far right by triangulating everything.
There's this great moment in which Bill Clinton, sorry, Jack Stanton, is at a union hall.
And this is right after sort of the stories have dropped about his infidelities.
And he has the crowd around his fucking finger.
You know, he's telling jokes.
They're like, you know, I mean, he's doing he's doing a perfect, you know, I'm a politician.
I have the crowd wrapped around my finger kind of job, you know, exactly what's going on.
And somebody asked, you know, something like, what are you going to do?
You know, what are you going to do to get our jobs back?
And he's like, absolutely key moment.
Yeah.
I'm going to tell you, and this is in the, and you can disagree with this, but in the conscious of the movie, this is meant to be Stanton being the perfect, like, like the voice of the future.
Right.
And his answer is basically, here's the truth.
No politician can reopen this factory, or bring back the shipyard jobs, or make your union strong again.
No politician can make it be the way it used to be.
Because we're living in a new world now, a world without economic borders.
A guy can push a button in New York and move a billion dollars to Tokyo in the blink of an eye.
And in that world, muscle jobs go where muscle labor is cheap, and that is not here.
So if you want to compete, you're going to have to exercise a different set of muscles, the one between your ears.
And then one of the, like, deep politicos, you know, says... He's lost him.
And then our hero, our hero, Henry Burton, says, well, he's got me.
And... I think he actually says, fuck them, he's got me.
Fuck them, he's got me.
Exactly, exactly.
There is no better encapsulation in the last, like, 30 years of democratic politics in this country.
It's perfect, because it is intended completely unironically.
You see, those poor people who work in a factory whose jobs are being lost, they don't understand the value of the neoliberal economics, which is now going to crush them.
Don't you want to be trained to use Microsoft Excel and work in an office instead of having a decent job in this factory?
For a while, before all those jobs are shipped abroad as well.
And of course, not to take basic labor and say, yeah, well, we shouldn't use mechanical implements to remove people's need for labor.
But ultimately, this is sort of the failure of this kind of electoralism in general, and the failure of bourgeois politics in particular.
Um, which Jack, I'm sure Jack could speak to much more eloquently than I can, but like, I feel like we should at least highlight that.
Like, it's not that we think that these people should be, you know, like given to like working in whatever, like it's like a fish processing plant or something, you know?
And like, yes, gutting the insides of dead fish.
That's not like a great life for people, you know, working on an industrial scale.
No, that's bad.
Yeah, having machines to do that, that's actually a good thing.
But there's nothing within anything like an American political system that actually acknowledges that maybe these people deserve some recompense for that.
And there was a place for that.
There is a logic to At that point, at the beginning of this neoliberal era, to reject this kind of Reaganist neoliberal policy and to say, no, actually, we're going to engage in something more like a social democratic process.
We're going to take these unions and we're going to Engage with them.
And instead, what they did was they reached out to the suburbs because we're going to triangulate every position.
And ultimately, these people who work in these factories, they're minuscule.
We don't care about them.
We would much rather have... We'd much rather try to appeal to Republicans who might vote for us in the suburbs in the next cycle.
And it was very successful for eight years.
And they're still doing it.
And Joe Biden's approval ratings are 25% because they're still pursuing it.
So, like, that's, yeah.
That's the key, isn't it?
It was successful for Clinton for eight years, you know.
Sorry, factory workers, but neoliberalism, fuck off.
Oh, suburban middle classes.
Yeah, we're going to punish the people below you, the welfare queens, come to us.
That worked for eight years, but it worked for eight years for Clinton because through Basically very little to do with him.
The economy was really good because the global economy was, you know, really good.
Really good is relative, you know, but it's not working for Biden now because the global economy is on a downswing.
It turns out that being president when like silicon was becoming a thing that was becoming accessible to the masses, mostly because of two decades on from vast government infrastructure spending on, you know, internet on, you know, like, TCPIP and various technologies that became the internet.
It turns out that being president in that era means that you sit on the crest of a booming economy.
Isn't that phenomenal for you?
And when certain firms anyway are reaping the profit benefits from the Reaganite deregulation orgy, and when the former communist world is being cannibalized by Western companies, etc.
Yeah, absolutely.
That is the only bit of real material politics he ever gives voice to in the entire film, and it amounts to, yeah, neoliberalism is just a fact of life.
It can't be changed.
It can't be resisted.
He doesn't tell them the truth because he doesn't tell them why it's happening.
He doesn't tell them that it's a conscious choice on the part of governments in response to declining and stagnating profit rates to deregulate, break union power, free up money to go wherever you want, etc., etc.
All these neoliberal policies, which is why their jobs are disappearing, either just disappearing completely or being moved into new sectors abroad or in different sectors.
You know, he doesn't actually tell them the truth.
What he says effectively is, shit happens and you've got to deal with it.
And the film, I mean, I agree with you on this one completely.
I think we differ on the ending, but on this one, I agree completely.
The film is just completely straight faced about this.
The film does not get any of the ironies here at all because it just has Henry, like, These dinosaur sort of union factory workers are kind of, but Henry is the man of conscience, the politically educated guy, the guy who's serious about real policies that are actually going to help people in the difficult modern world, and he's nodding along.
And that is where the film's sympathies lie, I think.
And where the film has a problem with the Clinton Project, it's all to do with personal morality.
And as I've pointed out, it's not even actually... Should we do negative ads, turns out, to be the last half of the movie.
Well, as I say, it's not even the aspects of personal morality that really matter, like raping teenagers.
It's the, should I be mean to the old white senator guy.
Picker, who we learned, we're not going to get into this, but you know, was like the previous generations, like he was the former like bright star that all of these people worked under until like Stanton and the Kathy Bates character, you know, sort of worked under him and then like kind of became, it came into their own political reality.
And so like going against him is like going against their own like previous But ultimately, there's no political reality to him, to Hackman's character, to Picker.
ideology or their ideals or their, you know, but ultimately there's no like political reality to him to have him in scared to picker.
It's ultimately a, um, a story of, he has really good political instincts and And again, like, it's hard to not like read this as just this sort of like indictment 20 years later, 24 years later.
Yeah.
24 years later of the, of that kind of DNC DLC, like, like instinct of, well, you know, who, you know, the greatest politician is the one that connects with the people that sort of says the right things and has the right talking points.
Regardless of the reality of the policies and that, you know, winning elections is all that matters, you know, because we're not the Republicans.
We're not the Republicans.
And I feel like we can't.
We can't end this without referring to the recent interview with Hillary Clinton in the Financial Times.
Are you familiar with this?
I'm not, no.
I know about it, but I haven't looked at it.
I'm not actually an avid follower of the remarks of Hillary Clinton, believe it or not.
Or presumably of the Financial Times.
I would assume that you're not like a regular reader.
Well, this came up in my Twitter feed on many, many occasions.
I'm reading from a link from the Financial Times.
The first voice we hear is the authorial voice of the author.
My espresso has arrived.
Clinton asked for more iced tea.
Is that actually the first line?
It's not the first line of the article, but of our segment here, of our sentence here.
Okay, alright then.
I cannot allow the lunch to end without questioning the direction of her party.
And just to be clear, the author has said on numerous occasions that their goal is to get something out of Hillary Clinton that other interviewers haven't, to ingratiate themselves, to actually get something out of this famously stonewalled politician, which And again, let's be clear.
Hillary Clinton has been attacked in the media, the right-wing media, to an astonishing degree.
She does not say any word that is not pre-calculated on 500 different levels.
I don't blame her for that, specifically.
I would do that too, in her position.
Again, this is attacking Hillary Clinton for all of the wrong reasons, you know?
The things to admire Hillary Clinton for... There being plenty of right reasons, but these are the wrong ones.
The reason to... I can admire Hillary Clinton in terms of her fortitude.
In terms of like, you know, holding fast against these far-right assholes.
And also say like, you also enabled the far-right assholes in a lot of ways, you know, but in more subtle ways.
And also you had slaves in your Arkansas mansion.
Anyway, just saying that here.
Libya and Honduras and drone strikes, etc, etc, etc.
All the other things, yes.
Links in the show notes, I'm sure.
Back to the article.
I say that Democrats seem to be going out of their way to lose elections by elevating activist causes, notably the transgender debate, which are relevant only to a small minority, period.
Wow, I didn't see that coming.
What sense does it make to depict J.K.
Rowling as a fascist?
To my surprise, Clinton shares the premise of my question.
A journalist at the Financial Times is shocked that Hillary Clinton shares the premise of the question that they asked.
I am also shocked, as you can tell.
Hillary Clinton responds.
We are standing on the precipice of losing our democracy and everything that everyone else cares about then goes out the window, she says.
Look, the most important thing is to win the next election.
The alternative is so frightening that whatever does not help you win should not be a priority.
Now, This has been kind of widely retweeted as Hillary Clinton said that fighting for trans rights is a bad thing to do.
Technically, what the article does is state in authorial voice that transgender debates, which are relevant only to a small minority, and then ask Clinton to respond to that.
So, we don't know the exact statement that Hillary Clinton might have made.
So, I cannot say specifically Based on this context that Hillary Clinton hates trans people or thinks that trans people should not have rights, et cetera, et cetera.
But based on the framing of this question, if we treat this as a realistic treatment of an actual conversation, in other words, if we treat this Financial Times reporter as being in any way legitimate as a reporter, this Hillary Clinton literally saying,
I'm going to throw trans people under the bus in terms of getting more Democrats elected, because ultimately it's better than the Republicans, and it doesn't matter ultimately how many trans people we have to burn, because ultimately the Republicans are worse.
In other words, Hillary Clinton, like a week ago in 2022, Is expressing the exact attitude that the film, 1998, and the book in 1996, and the whole logic of the 1992 campaign, the whole New Left Democrat thing, were saying.
Nothing has changed.
Nothing at all has changed in terms of this perspective.
Yeah.
And if there is any more damning indictment of the Clintons, even above their actual crimes and their actual, like all the things that like Jack can catalog for us in exquisite detail in which I could do in less exquisite, but also like Fairly good detail.
The fact that they are still pursuing this and the fact that this is the standard line of the Democratic Party is that, well, you just have to win elections because ultimately winning elections is what matters because we're better than the Republicans.
And it doesn't matter that Roe v. Wade is going to be crushed, probably by the time you listen to this episode.
It doesn't matter that we have lost for 30 years.
It doesn't matter, because ultimately, we're better than the Republicans.
And Maybe, even if we're looking within the realm of electoral politics, there is a better way of doing things.
And also, if this is the limit of where electoral politics are going in the United States, maybe, just maybe, we need to look beyond the context of electoral politics.
Well, no, I think you're completely wrong, Daniel, because I watched this brilliant movie called Primary Colors, and it made it clear that the only other alternative to just accepting all this reality, you know, just these sort of Democrat policies that accept the real world as you find it, i.e., you know, fucked up by Republicans, is to just accept all that and get elected and not change it.
In fact, to make it worse, slightly slower, so that the Republicans can then take it over eventually and go, you know, go into overdrive again.
So that in another few years you can say, well, you've got to vote for us because otherwise it's the Republicans.
And once we get in, we'll just accept everything they've been doing as the new normal and go back to making it slightly better.
Well, actually worse, more slowly.
We just accept that roundelay.
The only other alternative to that is to say, oh, we used to be like idealistic young McGovern-ites, but what's happened to us?
We can't even keep a crumb of our idealism to the point where we'll play the game, the essential game, the essential game that we all accept, the game of electoral politics.
We'll play that slightly nicer than the other side.
We can't even do that?
Oh, well, I better go and kill myself.
To me, those are the only horizons.
Just vote Democrat forever and hope that it gets worse slightly slowly for a few years at a time, or suicide.
I think the movie makes that clear.
Yeah, no, clearly.
Actually, Picker being like a man who had a bunch of Coke-fueled gay sex in the 80s in Florida with a bunch of Cuban men.
Actually, I'm more likely to vote for him.
Yes.
Picker 2024.
Like picker 2024.
That's what I'm saying.
Probably has a broader context for certain things that anyone in electoral politics in our country right now.
So, yeah, there's so much more we could do on this movie.
I feel like we say this at every time, like, we're like, yeah, let's just talk about a movie.
It's going to be goofy and fun.
And then we do like an hour and a half and it's like, we could do four hours, but not.
We will insist upon picking these sorts of movies, won't we?
Let's find interesting movies.
Although I feel like you and I could do, just pick a movie out of a hat.
Let's do Toy Story 2.
Yeah, we could fill four hours in terms of what Toy Story 2 has to say about Star Wars and the history of...
You know, commodification of, like, toy companies in the 1970s through the 90s.
I was gonna say, you picked a film that's literally about commodity fetishes.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm sorry, I just picked it out of my head, but you know what I mean, you know?
You're talking to the guy that castrated Buzz Lightyear in the name of Marxism, so, you know.
Right, yeah, well, there's that.
Anyway, did you have anything else you wanted to talk about before we wrap up here?
No, I mean, as you say, we could talk a lot more about this.
This is an interesting film, but yeah, I think we've talked long enough about this one.
Do you think people should watch this?
I mean, just like... They do, actually, yeah.
I do, because it made me have thoughts and feel feelings, you know, I'm very ambivalent about it.
But yeah, it definitely sparked thoughts, you know, I think ultimately, this film is a kind of rather disgusting sort of, you know, ex Hippie or ex-60s radical sort of boomer lefty.
It's very, it's very like, let's jerk off the boomers.
Like, that's what this is.
Yeah.
It's this rather sort of lament about, oh, you know, we used to be so young and idealistic, but what's happened to us?
But, you know.
Maybe we can salvage something, but isn't it tragic?
It's particularly disgusting because it's sort of told through this surface veneer of being about sort of black experience, you know, through this black character, who I learn is literally like a sort of puppet avatar for somebody who's actually a white guy, which makes it so much worse.
But it is interesting.
I will give it that.
Yeah, no, no.
I mean, it's well made.
We've talked about that a couple of times.
I, you know, I again, really, really enjoyed it when I was in my early 20s, when it was kind of like fairly fresh at the time.
It has not aged well, but I think it, you know, particularly if you view it outside of, you know, what we're doing in this conversation, that we just kind of view it as like a film on its own merits.
I think it is sort of doing some interesting things, and it is, again, very well made.
And I think it's also interesting as this time capsule of this era.
And I think that's really how I want people to approach it, in the same way that you would approach You know, some weird political thriller of the 70s and kind of go like, well, yeah, but at the time, dot, dot, dot.
You do have to kind of approach this.
Well, at the time, dot, dot, dot.
And I think that's, you know, this is not the last, you know, the last story in this, but I think it is a piece of people and I think it should be more widely viewed and studied ultimately.
So check it out.
Okay.
Well, that was bonus episode 17, did you say?
Yeah.
I don't know.
17, I think.
Probably.
Something like that, anyway.
Yeah.
And thanks ever so much for being here on this side of the paywall to listen to it.
And if it is 17, it's a prime number, so this is a prime merry color.
Whoa!
You brought it home.
Fantastic.
Okay.
That's enough.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
And that is pretty much where Daniel and I stopped talking about the movie, and therefore, as far as we were concerned, in the moment, stopped doing a bonus episode for Patreon backers.
But we kept on talking, and here's some of the rest of our conversation.
Yeah, no, I had a moment the other day.
I was watching some of the American news coverage of the January 6th hearings, you know, the committee hearings.
And, um, I can't remember who it was.
It was somebody like Chris Hayes or somebody like that, you know, commenting on it.
And, uh, it was just kind of on, you know, it drifts from the coverage to the opinion piece and so on.
And, uh, you know, Chris, Chris Hayes is all right as far as he goes.
He's a very nice progressive liberal, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
He was very nice in 2011.
He was very nice in 2011.
Yeah.
But it's like, you know, they're just nothing else at the moment but the January 6th hearings, and it's clear.
I mean, I don't want to downplay the importance of getting to the bottom of what went on inside the White House and the Trump Organization, etc., and their connections with the coup and all that.
I think that's important.
You know, a lot of people on the left are just like, you know, that's not important.
It's just lib stuff.
Just ignore it.
I don't agree with that.
I think it is important, but it's also the only thing they're fucking talking about, you know, and it's clear the Democrats have this attitude to it.
Like it's a truth and reconciliation committee, you know, like we just, we just make our nice little speeches and, uh, that'll, that'll make Trumpism go away because there are the, the, the honorable Republicans like Rusty Bowers, you know, et cetera, et cetera, who said after his testimony, you know, I'll vote for Trump again.
But, you know, this one report, you know, Hayes is talking about it and, you know, they cut to like footage from the January 6th riot and there's Nick Fuentes standing on that, uh, whatever it was with his, with his megaphone shouting.
And I'm, I'm like, it's Tell them who that is, Chris!
Tell them about him!
Tell them about Nick Fuentes!
Chris Hayes has no ability to talk about Nick Fuentes.
Because to talk about Nick Fuentes, well, A, he doesn't know.
I mean, someone on his staff probably knows.
I mean, I'll give them that.
There's a researcher back there who at least has some vague understanding.
It's not hard to Google Nick Fuentes.
And reach pieces from the SPLC and various other places that would tell you who Nick Fuentes is.
But within the framework of a four-minute segment on a cable TV network in terms of explaining,
Well, Nick Fuentes is someone who, you know, is a splinter group from the alt-right who created this Groper movement, which is in part of a, you know, a reactionary element against the more, you know, relatively progressive parts of the Republican Party.
And by the relatively progressive parts of the Republican Party, I mean Charlie Kirk, which should tell you everything you need to know.
Like, in terms of, like, exploring, like, this is something that these guys are really bad at, in terms of, like, really kind of getting into the nuances of, you know, like, the nuances of right-wing politics, or even, like, Republican politics, in which everything gets flattened into, you know, you're either with Trump or against Trump, because Trump is the big bad, right?
And I see Trump, I mean, frankly, I see Trump as basically irrelevant.
Even if he's president in 2024, I see him as irrelevant to the larger forces that we talk about.
Of course, he will do terrible things because he will appoint terrible people who are fed by the Federalist Society.
But the Federalist Society has set him up, and he just has the moxie to come in and be the new guy, ultimately.
I mean, he's he's again, he's a symptom, not a cause.
And that's and the further away from 2016 we get, the more obvious it is that Trump is not like Trump.
Trump is the catalyst.
Trump is not like the real mover behind this, you know.
And I feel like that focusing on him is sort of the original sin of these cable networks and these liberals.
It's like, well, if you just get rid of Trump, then it's done.
And so anyone who's against Trump, and that means Sam Harris is good, that means the Never Trumpers, that means Rick Wilson and Bill Kristol.
Yeah, these are perfectly fine people because they're anti-Trump, you know?
Liz Cheney is fine.
Mitt Romney.
These are good people now because they're anti-Trump.
George W. Bush.
Not as bad as Trump because he didn't say the right things.
They're fawning over Bill Barr.
Yeah, Mike Pence, you know.
Yeah, no, and it's a complete lack of, like, any kind of material analysis, and you don't even need, like, a real material analysis.
You just need to have, like, memory passed 15 minutes ago to get this.
What they want, you know, the Democratic Party and the sort of liberal progressive news hosts, this section of the media, what they want is for, you know, just the Republican Party to suddenly go, Oh, right.
No, I get it now.
Trump's bad.
Okay.
Okay.
So we get rid of him and a couple of other people and we get back to normal.
It's clear that that's what they want.
And they think if they just make this point over and over again, Trump knew this and he said that, and they think that's going to... But as you say, Trump is an expression of a tendency within the system.
And you can see that with the testimony at the committee, because what you see again and again is that Trump doesn't actually have a fucking clue what's going on.
Trump is a great big toddler.
at the center of this who's just stamping his foot saying, "I won.
I want to be the president.
I want to win." And what's the terrifying thing is that there's people around him, and we're not just talking about Stephen Miller and people like that.
We're talking about people who are just normal parts of the functioning of this government system who are doing, like Kershaw talks about with Hitler, working towards the Fuhrer.
They're coming up with this stuff themselves to work towards what the leader wants.
The leader wants to still be president.
Well, what we do is we come up with a strategy where we send this letter from the Department of Justice to them.
The system has this tendency within it already.
He's just, as you say, he's just catalyzing it.
And part of that is the presence of people.
It's not just telling people who Nick Fuentes is.
It's telling people, this guy there on screen, who's at the January 6th protests, screeching and screaming through a megaphone, he's...
He just had a conference and Marjorie Taylor Greene was there, Paul Gosar was at one of his previous conferences.
He's got documented links to people inside the Republican Party.
They're just missing this.
They're missing how it joins up in favour of this, oh, well, we've got Trump now because we've got some guy who says, oh, I told him you didn't win.
And it's like, How can you possibly miss the point this badly?
Well, it's in their material conditions to do so.
That's how, ultimately.
And, I mean, just thinking about Roe v. Wade, I mean, sorry, different thing, but I think I'm going to connect this up here.
What happened when the leaked decision happened?
Every Democratic politician, every elite, the DNC, you know, suddenly start sending out fundraising emails.
Donate.
Vote for us.
It's good for them.
It's good for them to have a Trump there to point against and say, we're not Trump.
It's good for them to have.
If Roe v. Wade ends, they're going to campaign for 30 years.
Keep voting for us.
Keep giving us money.
Keep doing the thing.
So that we can eventually, you know, put in enough justices or we can do the thing and, you know, we can... It's going to flip over.
The Republicans used, for 30 years, they used, you know, if we get in, we'll work against abortion.
And then they get in time and time again and they never actually get rid of abortion because they want to use it next time as the wedge issue again.
It's going to flip over so that, you know, Roe v. Wade gets appealed and it'll be the Democrats' turn for three decades to say, you've got to vote for us so that we can work on getting abortion back.
This system is just a seesaw.
The difference is that the Republicans had a very coherent political movement from the end of the 70s.
That was built on, you know, building the sort of like structural framework within the system to do this, you know, to repeal this and repeal like everything that came about from the Warren Court.
And there's nothing that I see on the Democratic side in which there's like a real like kind of effort at like a structural thing that's going to do anything.
On that scale.
Instead, what we're hearing from even the, you know, even the sort of like, even like an AOC is kind of doing like Green New Deal, which like, yeah, that's a great, well, it's problematic and, you know, it has details and implementation, et cetera, et cetera.
But yeah, no, great.
Yeah.
Let's do the Green New Deal.
Let's do some version of the Green New Deal.
Yeah.
That's a 30-year plan for a 10-year time horizon.
You have no hope of actually planning that and you have no structural thing because ultimately you're a 28-year-old bartender.
From the Bronx.
You don't have institutional money behind building a think tank that's going to give white papers that are going to defend your policies that every person on MSNBC is going to be able to pull out, which is exactly what the Republicans did.
Not to say that the Democrats should do what the Republicans did, but there's no sense of Like there being like a vision for the Supreme Court or whatever, you know, beyond, well, this should be a nonpartisan, like sort of legal structure.
And it's like, no, fuck you.
Legal realism is the thing that we need to embrace.
And we are embracing a fully progressive vision because ultimately that's what we need to do.
And this is a political body.
This is a fundamentally political body.
And fuck you if you think it's not.
And that's what I would like to see.
And no one in the Democratic Party or in any of the major Democratic institutions is doing anything of that sort.
And we're fucked.
We're just fucked.
It's done.
It's been done.
The second that Donald Trump was elected, it was done.
But Amy Coney Barrett, Dianne Feinstein hugged her.
I hugged her at the end of those confirmation hearings, and if there was ever a symbol of the failure of the Democratic Party and of the shit that's in primary colors, that whole structure of argument that's in, it is that.
That was the end result of Bill Clinton being president and that style of politics.
It's despicable.
It's fucking despicable.
That was I Don't Speak German.
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