RS: Yeah. So, but I mean, he had a real sense of decency and limits and so forth. And I realized -- and then I, you know, Clinton wrote me a letter saying yeah, oh, I liked your column, but what do you mean, right of center? I'm really this great progressive. And he listed all these things. Anyway, and then I get invited, thanks to Sidney Blumenthal, to a White House dinner; at which dinner, you know, Hillary Clinton, as I'm going through the receiving line, says oh! Robert Scheer, my favorite columnist in America -- no, in the whole world! You know.
TF: Wow.
RS: So these people know how to schmooze you, okay? And so forth --
TF: Yeah. No, can I tell you a similar -- I've never met Bill Clinton, but I went to his presidential library. And you know me, Robert; I'm very cynical and sarcastic and willing to believe the worst. And I went to his presidential library, and I listened to the narration that he himself recorded, you know, with that wonderful voice that he has. And I came away from that library loving the man.
RS: Oh, yeah.
TF: And it wasn't 'til several days later that I was able to sort of recover my balance after that. It's -- he is so charming, you know, that it's -- you know, look, I think I'm pretty hard on him in this book, but let's admit, he is a charming fellow.
RS: The book had a big impact on me. Because there's such clarity about the socializing, corrupting power of the socialization that they're involved in. You know, the Martha's Vineyard hook; how you can get along [with] Wall Street; it's all part of a notion of sophistication. So what I'm suggesting is maybe, you know, these people are -- what's the right word -- maybe they're not the lesser evil. [Laughs] Maybe it's a different kind of evil --
TF: I think that's, I think -- you could make the argument that Bill Clinton did things in the 1990s that no Republican would have been capable of doing. As you yourself said, Reagan couldn't push the -- well, maybe it was me that said -- Reagan couldn't push bank deregulation as far as Clinton did; Clinton pushed it, did things that Reagan would never have dared to do. Welfare reform, all the stuff with the deregulation -- he just went so much farther. NAFTA? George Bush couldn't get NAFTA passed, lest we forget; that took Bill Clinton to do it. You know, there's many examples like this. And so you start to think that the game that the Clintons play with us, where we vote for them because we have nowhere else to go -- you know, it's a two-party system, it's a duopoly, and there's -- you studied economics; there is a sort of political economics of how we the voter are manipulated in this situation, and they're very, very good at playing that game. And so people like you and me, who are on the left, are captured, basically; we don't have anywhere else to go, and they play us in a certain way. So in writing this book, I'm coming up against, I have a lot of friends who say well, you can't criticize the Democrats, because you'll just, you'll weaken them and then the Republicans will get in. But I say that we can't give up our critical faculties just because of the ugly historical situation that we're currently in.
RS: My only question would be, and this gets back to Nixon and the Cold War, at least when you have a Republican in power you have Democrats who will criticize. You have, you know, a dialogue going on. When you have a Democrat in power, it stifles the very people who could make the necessary criticism. Secondly --
TF: That's right, we're all supposed to get in line.
RS: Yeah, but also you start to implement policies, as Clinton did, that create the base of resentment in the country that can promote a right-wing jingoism, chauvinism of the kind that Trump has. After all, it's the failure of our economy to address income inequality, and the condition of workers, including white workers; the failure of the union movement -- all the things your book discusses in a compelling way -- that created the basis of what could be a neofascism or something, you know, even more direct, as we're seeing. Where you blame the immigrants, you blame others, you develop a hysteria, which we're seeing on the right. And so the real question is, how do you counter such forces? Do you get in line? --
TF: Oh, my God. Well, you know, this is the exact, this is the question of the book. This is the problem that -- you know, this is exactly what the book is about. It's funny that you mention Trump; I just finished writing a story about Trump. I watched a whole bunch of Trump's speeches, and I was -- I'm no fan of Trump, OK? Let's make that clear. But I was watching his speeches, and do you know what issue he emphasizes more than anything else? It's trade. It's trade. It's, like, trade deals like NAFTA, brought to you courtesy, brought to you by Bill Clinton and the Democrats. And he drives this thing home, and he leaves, there's no uncertainty in the minds of his listeners after they've sat through one of his speeches that he is a guy that is going to get tough with American companies that want to move their factories to Mexico or to China or anything like that. Left parties the world over were founded in order to give voice to and to help and to serve working people. That's what they exist for. And those people are now flocking to Donald Trump, who is railing against things like NAFTA. We're in this situation now where, thanks to the Clintons, and thanks to Obama, the social dynamics of the two-party system have been completely -- not completely, but mostly turned on their head. The appeal of centrism, the appeal of people like Bill Clinton, was the idea that by moving to the center, they were winners, you know; they could do what people like Walter Mondale and Jimmy Carter and Michael Dukakis couldn't do, right? By moving to the center, they were so practical, right? And they were going to triangulate, and they were going to win -- these are the ones -- but Bill Clinton, this great pragmatist who moved the Democrats to the center, the so-called center, is also the one that lost Congress. And Democrats, you know, my kind of Democrats, Franklin Roosevelt Democrats, had held Congress from the 1930s right up to Bill Clinton. From the thirties up 'til the 1990s, with only two very brief interruptions.
RS: If that's true, why are we kidding ourselves? Then the difference between a Bernie Sanders and a Hillary Clinton is enormous for the future of that party. It's not that they're basically, you know, in agreement, and they're basically good -- no, no. The debate between the two of them is fundamental. And you will not get progress with Hillary Clinton's approach; you'll get more of the same, and at least Bernie Sanders stands for a profound challenge of that way of doing business.
TF: I think that's right, I think that's probably right. I'm trying to not endorse candidates [laughs] or anything like that. But I --
RS: Well, then, be the theater critic --
TF: Look, the way -- sure, but look at the way Bernie Sanders is challenging the Democratic establishment. I think he is saying exactly what needs to be said about these guys. I think he is hitting the nail on the head. He's also challenging the Clintons on trade. And I think at this point, Hillary will say anything and change her opinion on anything in order to stave off that challenge. So the best, my biggest hope for Hillary is that as president, you know, maybe she'll --maybe she's had a change of heart or something like that. But I don't think that's really a good reason, you can't really bank on that, you know? If you look at the entire sort of sweep of Hillary Clinton's career, what Hillary Clinton is interested in has always just been meritocracy and professional achievement, which she usually expresses in these kind of feminist, you know, the sort of feminist vocabulary. But it's always -- it's always about --
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