FL: Whitewater, your own take on that.
CROUCH:
When I heard all of that noise, I thought somebody was gonna reach under
the chair and pull out and say, Bill Clinton got 750,000 dollars this time
and his buddy got 3 million, then I found out that he put 500,000 for Clinton
in another account and then Hillary put her name on it, and she went, and then
they bought some more over here. And then when they start talking about these
measly sums, I said now, are those important amounts of money even in Arkansas?
It didn't really, it didn't seem to me to be enough dough for me to ever, to
figure out if that's enough money for me to be bothered about.
LESSARD:
Well, I look at it in a slightly different way. Something like
Whitewater raises the question for me why is this guy in politics? Is he in
politics to, for personal gain? Is he in politics to help out his buddies? Or
is he in politics to try to do something good? And that's the one thing that's
most frustrating to me about the whole Clinton promiscuity, irregularity, sort
of issue, continual disappointment about Clinton that keeps coming up is that
ultimately I still feel about this guy that he is one of our most idealistic
Presidents. I do not feel that he has entered politics for his personal gain
or even in a way for power that he really wants to do good. That he wants to
leave the country better off than he found it and that he's tripping himself
off. To me that's the real issue in these, and I, the subscandals that we get,
and I feel that that's one of the reasons for the country's boredom in it. I
agree about the small sums as well. Clearly, if he is in politics for personal
gain, he isn't very successful at it
O'DONNELL:
I would caution you to be very careful about using small sums of money as the
measure of scandal of politicians. This was a Governor who was paid $24,000 a
year, when his wife was making $100,000 in commodities trading. Now in Mexico,
granted, you get to make hundreds of million of dollars if you are in the
ruling party there. Arkansas isn't Mexico. But you know, the Congress itself
felt that its temptation level was too strong when it was allowed to take
$2,000 for giving speeches and the Congress itself ruled that Congressmen and
Senators can no longer take $2,000 for giving a speech. You know, these
people don't make a lot of money in government salaries, so what you might find
to be an unimpressive amount of money, could be a very serious amount of money
to someone in this line of work.
REMPLE:
And in fact I've done stories about local officials in California in the
past, who've taken sums of 100, 50, television sets for goodness sake. It's
amazing what people will trade their authority and their power for and it's
trivial often what brings them down is very trivial. I'm not saying that's the
case here.
O'DONNELL:
But you know I think the public has accepted your basic definition of
what is at issue in Whitewater, which is this question of --- did he, as the
sitting Governor of Arkansas, do favors for his friends that benefitted them
financially. And I think the public has concluded well yes he did. As have
all other governors of all other states, and do many Senators in the course of
a day as do most Congressmen whenever they get the chance. Now what's next?
REMPLE:
And that's part of the conversation that the country has over who's a
candidate, over who should be elected. But they are informed. And so the
press does its role. I do my job by presenting the information. I think it's
a wonderful exercise in democracy that we get this information as a country,
filter it out and elect somebody. And those that are, that don't want the
press to do this function have no confidence in the democracy that they are
supposedly protecting.
FL: Are there any comparable issues with Dole?
REMPLE:
The issues with Dole were questions maybe in a more traditional way. Does he
take care of the folk that take support him the most. I mean he gets the money
from special PAC-special interests, and does he take better care of them, is he
a better friend of the NRA than he is of another group or another citizen?
O'DONNELL:
The answer is, well yes, he tries to be, just as Bill Clinton is a much better
friend to the teachers union, and the AFLCIO and all sorts of different
contributors. I mean that's, you're going find Dole and Clinton absolutely
identical in their behavior toward attention given to issues raised by
contributors. They will give more attention to that than they will to issues
that do not involve contributors. And all politicians will.
TAYLOR:
What I find interesting about a Dole/Clinton campaign is here you have two
politicians, two men who are politicians to the core who believe in the
nobility of politics, who believe in making the trains run on time, one from a
legislative background one from an executive background, who by the standards
of that craft have both been enormously successful at it. But who have to
spend this particular campaign and every political campaign they have run
pretending they are not that because that is not, that is not an attractive
person in American popular culture. The centrist politician that just sort of
wants to deal with issues as they come.
So you go through this exercise in these campaigns where Dole presents himself
as more conservative and more rigid than he really is. Clinton you know, as
more liberal. I think the public gets that, but I do think that it contributes
to a kind of disillusionment that is built up that we're in this time where we
really hold politicians in unusually low regard, we always held them in low
regard, it's probably healthy that we do that, we're in this period where
people really think it's all, it's all a big game, they can't take it too
seriously. We sort of know how the sausage is made, it seems to me that's,
that's what's interesting about this era in our political life, we know all the
tricks of the trade and we know that they are packaging themselves in some
ways. And it is the role of the journalist to point all this out. It is our
duty, we do inform the public, it seems to me ultimately the discouraging thing
is that the public taking all of this in, half of them, by election day, don't
show up for the finale. They drop out of the process altogether, because the
way that the campaign has unfolded and the way that this exploration of
character has unfolded has taught them, -- not interested, doesn't have
anything to do with me, the mortgage, the kids, the college and this and that,
it's for somebody else.
So ....I would argue it's different, because throughout the whole 19th Century
you had very sharp partisanship, you had ugly campaigns and ugly things being
said about people time and time again. But a very engaged electorate. At
least that electorate that was allowed to vote was engaged. And being a
Democrat or being a Republican meant something important to you like being a
Catholic or being an Episcopalian, or being a carpenter, it was part of who you
were.
We are now in an era where no one says --oh I'm a Democrat and that's you
know that's what I am to my core. So we are sort of free floating. And we're
candidate driven, rather than party driven obviously, we've never been
particularly ideologically driven so it's actually these campaigns that become
very important, they become the moment in our national political life, where we
mount it all up and the media takes this positions and they do all these
stories and we look for the gaps and the episodes and the scandals and the
private lives and we sort of all know how to do this, and to me it's an odd way
that we have evolved in our politics, and it's messy and people get hurt, but
to return to something that I said earlier, I think I think we get better at
it, you know, I think in the end that this disconnected, very cynical public,
doesn't get fooled very often. That they are very shrewd editors of this media
environment that comes, and when a Whitewater comes down the pike, people may
not pay attention to every last detail of it, but they form a judgment of it
that in the end I, I think the judgement is I don't think, I the American, the
average American citizen, don't think Bill Clinton is venal about being in
public office to enrich himself. And therefore this doesn't interest me all
that much and I am not going to stay with this story.
FLN: What about reporting on alleged sexual scandals...
REMPLE:
Sex is not an easy issue for me as a reporter to deal with. Sex makes
editors really queazy, and therefore I'm queazy. I mean I don't operate
without the editor. But in Arkansas, there were so many stories, I mean, it
would be one thing if we'd just heard,--here's somebody comes in and offers a
story about him or another one here. This was a number that in just in volume
was, well I've never encountered it, this degree, this volume. Volume of
accusations. Specific stories, general stories, it seemed like you couldn't
meet anybody in Arkansas who didn't either have a relative who had spent time
with Clinton, or their wife's best friend had. It was the two percent of
separation seemed to be at play.
Having dinner I'd meet strangers at a restaurant and this would come up.
It was completely, it was constant. It was, it was not an isolated case,
It was not an isolated case of sexual affairs or promiscuity, it wasn't just
one incident, it was, it was, we figured that it must be hundreds. Hundreds,
hundreds. I mean if you just, if you just take a chance meeting with this
stranger and that stranger and you find this many stories, how many are there.
So having that experience, made me, when the troopers came forward to talk
about what they knew, I already knew the stories I wanted to ask them about
because I'd heard the stories. And in many cases, the troopers had been
witnesses to these stories and provided the corroboration that previously
hadn't been possible. So I had a number of stories already, the one's that fit
in that box that were that were related the personal life related to his public
conduct, those stories were given flesh and bones by the eye witness accounts
that came later. But those first accounts all through '92 during the campaign
year were voluminous. And so those numbers by themselves created a dilemma for
us, for me.
LESSARD:
I think that there is definitely also a feminist issue here, I think for
me personally, this is the first President of my generation, my experience,
my political quarter, and it is really disappointing to me that he would allow
himself to behave this way. We are changing in our attitudes toward women, we
are moving forward, one would not be that surprised had it been someone of
another generation, from another sort of mind set and value set, but that he
has behaved this way is troubling, and in some ways just discouraging generally
about how far we've come.
Because when you really come down to it, it is not a way to treat women, to
have hundreds and hundreds of women in this way, it is not a case of women like
him, he likes women, women like him. That is a much too civil description for
this kind of behavior, so I can't afford to make my voting decision based on
this, I wouldn't, I'd have to be some kind of fanatic to do that, I don't think
it should be the basis, but from a feminist point of view, this is, this is,
you know a deeply troubling issue as well a his treatment of his wife.
(interruptions) Yes, if you are married to someone and you behave this way,
you never know what agreements are made within a marriage and one of the
problems reporting on this kind of matter is that you can never see into a
marriage, don't know what goes on inside it, you don't know what the situation
is for one spouse or the other, and that is the reason why I think individual
or, you know affairs are really off limits completely.
But this kind of behavior is cruel, and very very destructive for the spouse,
almost categorically, I guess one can't absolutely say categorically, and so
again, I don't know that it affects how it would conduct his, be as a
politician, his professionalism as a politician, I think you're absolutely
right, there's no reason at all that it needs to affect that. But it's really
hard to overlook.
O'DONNELL:
Well, you know, I overlook it entirely. I might come from an extreme
position, but there is nothing you could tell me about Bill Clinton's private
life or personal life because I invest nothing in him as a person. Absolutely
nothing. I've learned to invest nothing in baseball players as heros. We used
to idolize Babe Ruth, now we find out he was a drunk, he wasn't too good to
wives either, you know, idolatry is a mistake. These are humans, they tend to
be attention desiring human beings, they tend to have very weak ego cores that
they overcompensate for with a lust for a cause, it's a simple psychology.
They are not likely to be admirable people at the core. My interest is, how
does Bob Packwood vote? My interest is, what does Bill Clinton sign what does
he veto? My interest is, what does Teddy Kennedy vote on. That's my interest.
LESSARD:
Now wait a second. Now wait a second. If this were a question of how
one treated African-Americans--we're at a certain stage in our history and
evolution about that, that certain things, though it might not affect how he
acted as, his professionalism as a politician, you would still say I can't
tolerate that.
O'DONNELL:
We know that Nixon was an anti-Semite. It's on tape. He didn't do a
single anti-Semitic thing as President. And it is possible to my imagination
and indeed I feel I know one or two federal office holders who have a racist
inclination quietly bound inside them here or there. It will make itself known
in no way in public policy.
LESSARD:
All right, and this would not affect your vote at all?
O'DONNELL:
I would prefer to have a non-racist who voted the same way. But if a
racist votes exactly the same way I want him to vote in liberal terms you know,
I don't have a complaint.
LESSARD:
Does that happen?
O'DONNELL:
Robert Byrd, you know, who functions now as kind of a liberal
Democratic Senator, comes from almost the heart of a Klansman in his previous
history. We've seen Senators grow up on the job. You've got Strom Thurman,
you know you watch Senators change parties, you watch them change membership in
country clubs and in the Ku Klux Klan and all sorts of thing.
LESSARD:
Well growth and change is something entirely different.
continued
