Hollywood & Politics, Part 6:How The Clinton Presidency and The 2000 Election Were Reframed By Hollywood and California Retroactively to Fit Their Left-Wing Narrative

 

Last year  in an interview Jay Leno pointed out how today's comedians, particularly in late night, have essentially become political activists more determined on setting an agenda he was almost universally vilified by every comedian going back thirty years. In typical left-wing agenda they chose to attack Leno by arguing about all the political jokes he made and in particularly how much he had skewered Monica Lewinsky during Clinton's second term and beyond.

The first has nothing to do Leno's point but I'd like to focus on the second because it is another extraordinary example of Hollywood and the left rewriting history. Because as someone who lived through the 1990s I remember how every single comedian, from Letterman to Chris Rock to Conan O'Brien to The Daily Show to Saturday Night Live chose to cover the Lewinsky affair. And to a man and a woman, black or white, they were all on the side of Clinton. This was a position they only chose to back away from, critically, when the MeToo movement was becoming prevalent in the aftermath of the Trump's first election to the Presidency. Only more than two decades after the fact did they choose to admit that they had behaved poorly and offer a retroactive condemnation of Clinton, and even then they did so in a passive aggressive way.

(And for the record if Lewinsky chooses to reframe herself as the victim now I remember she spent much of that period steering into the skid. She chose to appear as herself on SNL while impeachment proceedings were going on and she certainly looked like she was enjoying herself. I realize the power structure was changed but it is far more difficult for me to see her as a victim the way that Anita Hill and Paula Jones clearly were.)

And to be clear I think it was only because Clinton was a constant victim of attack from Republican politicians, Rush Limbaugh and the brand new Fox News that Hollywood and the left even took his side at all. Because I remember those times. Hollywood thought Bill Clinton was a fat, lecherous hillbilly from the moment they met him and the only reason they tolerated him during his two runs for the Presidency was because the Democrats had been out of power for twelve years and they made the assumption that Clinton would serve as a restoration of the liberal order.

They choose to ignore the fact that during the campaign Clinton had rejected the liberal campaigns of Mondale and Dukakis and seemed more inclined in finding a 'Third Way'. He spent much of the lead-up to the nomination attacking the left and trying to win over the center (I'll deal with that in a separate article) And even though he won the Presidency he did so only because of the Ross Perot campaign splitting the vote.

Clinton had embraced a new style of governing known as 'neoliberalism' which led to much success for governments throughout the world during that decade and the early 2000s. It has since fallen to disrepute from left-wing scholars who have chosen to argue that Clinton sold out the left when he never once promised to govern that way. Like Jimmy Carter in 1976 Clinton had realized how much the country had gone to the right and that the liberal order had died in Nixon's blowout of McGovern in 1972.

Bill Clinton spent his term governing that way and acknowledging the reality of liberalism's demise arguing for economic realities and spending much of his term in office 'triangulating the right'. This worked immensely at the time and allowed him to survive his impeachment by House Republicans in 1998 with overwhelmingly high popularity numbers.

But to the left at the time this was the ultimate betrayal and remains so to this day.  To them there is no Third Way, there's only one way and that is to govern to the left. The fact that Clinton had become the first Democrat to win reelection since FDR did nothing to change their feelings about him; in their minds liberalism was the only way to go.

One sees during the Clinton Presidency the rise of many films with fictional Democratic Presidents and politicians. The most critically acclaimed were Rob Reiner and Aaron Sorkin's The American President, Warren Beatty's Bulworth, which seems to be a protest against the reality of conservatism in both parties and Rod Lurie's The Contender, released on the eve of the 2000 election with Jeff Bridges playing a Democratic President trying to name a female Senator to the Vice Presidency (Joan Allen) who is attacked by a conservative politician planning to 'gut the bitch in the belly'.

This was seen in prominent blockbusters as well. Independence Day has a former fighter pilot now President (Bill Pullman) who personally flies a fighter plane to destroy an alien invaders but gives an inspiring speech before leading the forces into battle. 1998's Deep Impact featured Morgan Freeman playing the President (for the first of several times) who rallies the world as America facing a comet that will be an extinction level event.

All of these films were either released or greenlit before The West Wing debuted in the fall of 1999 and in hindsight I'm inclined to see them as Hollywood engaging in wish fulfillment of the kind of Presidents they really wanted to be in power aside from that fat, adulterous slob in the White House. They didn't bother with legislation or working to make great bills; they just have awe inspiring speeches and the public did whatever they did without hesitation.  Considering that there has always been a belief among the left that the President could just press a button and make the government do what it wanted I believe these simplistic versions very much seemed how the Presidency should work rather than the reality of the time.

And that would become even clearer as the 2000 election unfolded weeks after we should have had a winner.

 

In the aftermath of the 2000 election far left websites like Daily Kos and filmmakers like Michael Moore would frame the election of George W. Bush as the first example of 'proof' that the Republicans knew that they were on the verge of being wiped out by Democrats and progressive values and stole the election from the rightful choice of the masses Al Gore, by a combination of Florida Republicans and a conservative Supreme Court.

It's a good story and there are certain elements of truth in regard to Florida and the Court's involvement. The problem is that it whitewashes both the historical record and the left's role.

First as someone who lived through the 2000 election I remember that it wasn't until the Florida recount and its aftermath that the left fell in love with Al Gore. In the eleven months beforehand no one thought there was a difference between these two men. There was, and the left felt W intellectually unqualified to become President from the moment he announced his campaign.

But as is always the case this didn't translate into a love for the Democrat. The major charge against Gore was that he was stodgy and boring.  The fact that he had spent a decade in Congress, had been a Senator and served two terms as Vice President and by that metric was infinitely more qualified than W to be President didn't change the left and Hollywood's problem that they found him stiff.

More to the point Gore, being part of the Clinton administration, was also considered neoliberal himself and was part of the continuing argument that had never gone away with the left that 'there was no real difference between the two parties'. Furthermore the left yet again chose to make the same fallacious argument they'd made ever since Richard Nixon's rise to power: "no intelligent person will ever vote for Bush". That their track record on this had been proven incorrect time and against during the 20^th century shows their continuing to dismiss what appealed to the plain people. Indeed during much of the leadup to the fall campaign the only candidate who excited Hollywood and the left was Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.

How many people chose to justify their vote for Nader was bizarre considering how much he openly hoped for Bush's victory, saying that he would vote for Bush if forced and that he would feel no regret if Gore lost: "I'd rather have a provocateur than an anesthetizer in the White House. Nader would eventually get 97,421 votes in Florida, which Gore lost by only 537 votes. In a letter to environmentalists he attacked Gore for his role of being the prototype for 'the bankable, Green corporate politician." The Sierra Club president called Nader's strategy irresponsible" Multiple publications have criticized Nader for throwing the election to Bush.

This is more, I should add, then people like Nader himself has acknowledged. While his own campaign would later admit that if he had not run Al Gore would most likely have won, he has spent the last quarter of a century continuing to not only deny responsibility but to continue to advocate that there is no difference between the two parties. In the last decade he continues to write books that, while they openly denounce Trump as the enemy, just as often say there is no difference between the two parties and liken the Bush and Obama administrations as ‘laying the groundwork for Trump’s election’. He still sees himself as blameless for whatever role he played in W’s election and it is clear given the many on the far left who have emerged in his wake that they share his views openly.

Its worth remembering that after Bush v. Gore played out the general reaction of the populace was essentially indifference. The left would eventually embrace the idea of Gore being a martyr only after first 9/11 and the War on Terror, as well as the Iraq war. But none of them seemed willing to argue Gore should run against Bush in 2004, something that seemed to suit him just fine. Historically the only Presidential candidates the left ever worships are those who lose, those who accept their martyrdom in silence.

The left would begin to start to rewrite electoral history for good starting in 2008. This involved some creative arithmetic of their own. They chose to ignore the Republican revolution that began with Nixon in 1968 and continued essentially until the end of the 20^th century as not a true expression of the electorate's will. Their recounting would begin in 1992 with the election of Clinton and then argue until 2012 the Democrats had won five out of the next six elections. would argue that the 2000 election was a subversion of the will of the people and in some circles many would later argue the 2004 election had been stolen from John Kerry.

In this retelling only the Presidential election counting not the various Congressional ones during this period. They chose to ignore the Republican Revolution in 1994 that gave both houses of Congress to the Republicans until 2006 as not being the 'true' will of the masses. This would involve the 2000 election itself when the electorate basically chose to leave both houses of Congress unchanged. The Republicans lost two seats in the House while the Democrats gained four seats in the Senate, making it a 50-50 tie.  At the end of the day the electorate could not make up its mind about which party it wanted it power.

And it's not as though Al Gore won the popular vote by a landslide. He basically won by a margin of 540,000 votes out of 110 million cast for both parties. And its worth noting that the major reason Gore won the popular vote was because he carried California by 1.3 million votes. So in a sense California made Al Gore the winner in the popular vote.

And while there very likely was chicanery in Florida the fact remains that Gore lost by 537 votes out of six million cast. It's hard to imagine that even had there been a significant shift in a recount that the margin would have given Gore a landslide in Florida. And strangely most of the focus was made on the voters who chose to vote for Reform Party Candidate Pat Buchanan's vote. There was no reference to the over 97,000 votes given to Nader in Florida.

As for the subsequent Republican gains in Congress both in the midterms and Bush's reelection in 2004 the left began a pattern they maintain to this day. The will of the people was being subverted by a handful of corporate oligarchs and media tycoons. One is familiar with the usual suspects: the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine which led to first Limbaugh and then Fox News, the work of bad actors like Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney and later oligarchs such as the Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch. Republican lawmakers were gerrymandering districts to subvert the will of the electorate in the House and the people in Middle America and the South were either racists or illiterate. The concept that the electorate might actually like Republicans and conservative values never entered the conversation.

This rewriting continued after Obama's election and throughout his Presidency where the Republicans were officially all brushed as racists and everyone who voted for a Republican candidate in either party equally so. The publications like Daily Kos and The Nation never made the Democrats the heroes in this story, even after Obama's election: they still considered them only slightly better than the Republicans. The crime that Clinton and Obama made was that they decided to be Presidents for all Americans, something the left has never accepted. They were increasingly convinced, as they always are, that America wants left-wing values and the only reason they vote otherwise is because they're too dumb to realize it's good for them.

The narration of America as a bastion of liberalism wasn't in keeping with California own electoral history during this period. Indeed between 1966 and 2010 it followed a pattern much like the country as a whole. It was governed by Republicans 31 years out of 44 (Jerry Brown from 1975-1982 and Grey Davis from 1999 until his recall in 2003). The state's governors have mostly followed conservative policies throughout Republicans. Brown spent as much of his gubernatorial race running for President (making efforts in both the 1976 and 1980 Democratic primary). And the overwhelming majority of propositions that are now part of gospel for the left from publicly funded elections to regulations of utilities failed when they came to a vote in landslides.

This included passage of single-payer health care. In 1994 it was put on the ballot as an Initiative and received 27 percent of the vote. The proposal has been proposed by the legislature multiple times but Schwarzenegger vetoes it twice under his administration. They have tried multiple times to get it through the legislature under Jerry Brown but it has repeatedly been put on hold because there were concern over financing.  As if this writing a new bill is still before the California legislature but it was withdrawn by January of 2022 because they didn't have to votes to pass it.

This pattern, it should be noted., has played out in several state legislatures over the past thirty years but with the sole exception of Vermont, all of them failed. Many of these were in the bluest states of the Union from Illinois to Colorado and throughout New England. Only in 2011 did Vermont manage to pass it and it would be abandoned in 2014, saying the costs and tax increases were too high to implement.

So the idea of liberal ideas being universally approved keeps running against reality especially in California.  By and large Hollywood itself chose not to spend the period throughout the 21^st century continued its trend of attacking who was in power equally and during Schwarzenegger's governorship, frequently made fun of how they themselves could not be trusted when it came to governing. The academic left in California might have been deluded but by and large Hollywood was not.

That would change in the aftermath of the 2016 election.

In the penultimate article in this series I will discuss Hollywood's attitude towards electoral politics in general during the 21^st century and how that era changed forever in the aftermath of the 2016 election.