Living History by Unknown (best non fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

Paula Corbin Jones held a press conference and appeared to identify herself as the Paula in the article.

Cliff Jackson, who was trying to raise money for a “ Troopergate Whistleblower’s Fund,” introduced her to the press. She said she wanted to clear her name. But instead of announcing a libel suit against the Spectator, she accused Bill Clinton of sexually harassing her by making unwanted advances. Initially, the mainstream press disregarded Jones’s claim, because her credibility was tainted by her association with Jackson and the disgruntled troopers. We expected this story to die like the other phony scandals.

But on May 6, 1994, two days before the statute of limitations ran out, Paula Jones filed a civil suit against the President of the United States, asking for $700,000 in damages.

Someone was raising the stakes in this game. It had moved from the tabloids to the courts.

D-DAY

Washington is a city of rituals, and one of the most faithfully observed is the annual Gridiron Dinner, a white-tie affair in which leading Washington journalists dress up in costumes, perform zany skits and sing songs that make fun of the current administration, including the President and First Lady. Guests at the dinner include the club’s sixty members as well as their colleagues and dignitaries from the political, business and journalistic worlds. The Gridiron Club was slow to change with the times. Women were not admitted until 1975. (Eleanor Roosevelt used to throw “Gridiron Widows” parties for excluded spouses and female journalists.) In 1992, White House reporter Helen Thomas was elected the first female President. Membership in the club remains highly selective, and invitations to the spring event are among the most coveted in town. The First Couple almost always attend, seated on the ballroom dais, being good sports no matter what is said about them. Sometimes they come up with spoofs of their own.

When the 109th Gridiron Dinner rolled around in March 1994, Bill and I knew we had not sold the administration’s health care plan with enough clarity and simplicity to rouse public support or to motivate Congress to act in the face of well-financed, well-organized opponents. The Health Insurance Association of America was concerned that the Administration’s plan would curtail insurance companies’ prerogatives and profits. To raise doubts about reform, the group launched a second round of advertisements, featuring a couple named Harry and Louise. Sitting at a kitchen table, Harry and Louise asked each other cleverly contrived questions about the plan and wondered aloud what it might cost them.

As intended, the ads exploited the fears – pinpointed by focus groups―of the 85 percent of Americans who already had health insurance and worried it might be taken away.

For the Gridiron Dinner, Bill and I decided to stage a parody of the insurance lobby’s TV spot, with Bill playing “Harry” and me playing “Louise.” It would give us a chance to expose the scare tactics employed by our opponents and have some fun. Mandy Grunwald and comedian AI Franken wrote a script, Bill and I memorized our lines and, after a few rehearsals, recorded our version of “Harry and Louise” on videotape.

It went like this: Bill and I were seated on a sofa―he in a plaid shirt, drinking coffee, and me in a navy blue sweater and skirt―examining a massive sheaf of papers, meant to be the Health Security Act.

Bill: Hi, Louise, how was your day?

Me: Well, fine, Harry―until now.

Bill: Gee, Louise, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.

Me: Well, it’s worse than that. I’ve just read the Clinton health security plan.

Bill: Health care reform sounds like a great idea to me.

Me: Well, I know, but some of these details sure scare the heck out of me.

Bill: Like what?

Me: Like for example, it says here on page 3,764 that under the Clinton health security plan, we could get sick.

Bill: That’s terrible.

Me: Well, I know. And look at this, it gets worse. On page 22,743―no, I got that wrong-on page 27,655, it says that eventually we’re all going to die.

Bill: Under the Clinton health plan? You mean after Bill and Hillary put all those bureaucrats and taxes on us, we’re still all going to die?

Me: Even Leon Panetta.

Bill: Wow, that is scary. I’ve never been so frightened in all my life.

Me: Me neither, Harry.

Together: There’s got to he a better way.

Announcer: “Paid for by the Coalition to Scare Your Pants Off”

It was an atypical performance for a First Couple, and the audience loved it. The Gridiron Dinner is supposedly off-the-record, and journalists who attend are not supposed to write about it. But full-blown stories about the songs and skits routinely appear the next day. Our videotaped performance was widely covered, even replayed on several Sunday morning news shows. Although some pundits speculated that the spoof would simply attract more attention to the real Harry and Louise ads, I was glad we raised questions about the tone of the insurance lobby’s campaign and the absurdity of its claims.

Moreover, it just felt good to inject some levity into an otherwise humorless situation.

While our little skit gave Washington politicos and journalists a good laugh, we knew we were still losing the public relations war on health care reform. Even a popular President armed with a bully pulpit could not match the hundreds of millions of dollars spent to distort an issue through negative and misleading advertisements and other means. We also were confronting the power of the pharmaceutical companies, who feared that controlling the prices of prescription drugs would diminish their profits, and the insurance industry, which spared no expense in its campaign against universal coverage. And some of our supporters were losing enthusiasm for the plan because it didn’t fulfill all of their wishes. Finally, our proposal for reform was inherently complex―just like the health care problem itself―which made it a public relations nightmare. Virtually every interest group could find something objectionable in the plan.

We were discovering that some opposition to health care reform, like Whitewater, was part of a political war that was bigger than Bill