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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Today is the 30th anniversary of the inauguration of Bill Clinton as president of the United States. It was the first time in 12 years that the country had a Democratic president. That same year, 1993, Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor of New York. It was the first time in 28 years the city had elected a Republican mayor. Why did America move left and the city move right, and how do those choices help give us the world and the issues we're living with today?

Well, right now, we begin a six-part series today through next Friday here in the eleven o'clock hour about the year of Bill and Rudy and how 1993 did a lot to set up the world of 2023. We'll start with an excerpt from Bill Clinton's inaugural address. Born in 1946, he was one of the first baby boomers. Clinton and Donald Trump were born just two months apart. Coming off of 12 years of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Clinton framed his ascent squarely in generational terms.

Bill Clinton: Today, a generation raised in the shadows of the Cold War assumes new responsibilities in a world warmed by the sunshine of freedom but threatened still by ancient hatreds and new plagues. Raised in unrivaled prosperity, we inherit an economy that is still the world's strongest but is weakened by business failures, stagnant wages, increasing inequality, and deep divisions among our own people. When George Washington first took the oath I have just sworn to uphold, news traveled slowly across the land by horseback and across the ocean by boat.

Now, the sights and sounds of this ceremony are broadcast instantaneously to billions around the world. Communications and commerce are global. Investment is mobile. Technology is almost magical and ambition for a better life is now universal. We earn our livelihood in America today in peaceful competition with people all across the earth. Profound and powerful forces are shaking and remaking our world. The urgent question of our time is whether we can make change our friend and not our enemy.

Brian Lehrer: We can make change our friend and not our enemy, the question of our time. A minute and a half of Bill Clinton's inaugural address 30 years ago today, and such is the lofty language of inauguration speak, right? We can make change our friend and not our enemy. As the internet was just being born, you heard him marvel at how technology is almost magical. No downsides yet.

He at least accepted in that quote that commerce had become global and investment had become mobile. That, of course, would become a defining feature of Clinton's presidency that we grapple with to this day, but he also listed some of the problems Americans had at that time that led many Americans to vote for him, but that made some others very wary of a young Democrat. Here's one more minute from that inaugural address.

Bill Clinton: This new world has already enriched the lives of millions of Americans who are able to compete and win in it. When most people are working harder for less, when others cannot work at all, when the cost of health care devastates families and threatens to bankrupt our enterprises, great and small, when the fear of crime robs law-abiding citizens of their freedom, and when millions of poor children cannot even imagine the lies we are calling them to lead, we have not made change our friend. We know we have to face hard truths and take strong steps, but we have not done so. Instead, we have drifted. That drifting has eroded our resources, fractured our economy, and shaken our confidence.

Brian Lehrer: He cited the Democratic issues of poverty and wage stagnation and unemployment. There had been a deep recession that alienated people from Bush. A Clinton campaign mantra, if only behind the scenes, was, "It's the economy, stupid." We'll talk about that, but he also mentioned crime and his compromises with Republicans on how to address both crime and the economy are two of the biggest ways that the Bill and Rudy world of 1993 helped give us the world of 2023, the world of today. Let's talk about it.

Joining us first for this series are two top journalists who covered the Clinton campaign back then and would've been watching that inaugural address 30 years ago today. Eleanor Clift, these days, a columnist for The Daily Beast. She was a White House correspondent for Newsweek in the Carter and Reagan years, then covered the Clinton campaign, and was named deputy Washington bureau chief of Newsweek in 1992. She is also well-known as a panelist on the long-running political TV talk show, The McLaughlin Group, when it was on and has written books, including Selecting a President and Madam President: Shattering the Last Glass Ceiling.

David Maraniss, these days, associate editor at The Washington Post. He won in 1993, Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Clinton campaign, and is author of the books, First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton and The Clinton Enigma. He also wrote a book in 1996 subtly titled, Tell Newt to Shut Up. He's written other biographies of political and sports figures, including his recent one from last year, Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe. Eleanor and David, thanks so much for coming on for this. Welcome back to WNYC.

Eleanor Clift: Glad to be with you.

David Maraniss: Thank you, Brian. Wonderful to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we'll continue on the oral history jag we've been on lately. If you voted for Bill Clinton for president in 1992, dredge up those memories. I won't say, "Drudge up those memories." That's a Bill Clinton reference in another way, and tell us why. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, and a special invitation to anyone who voted for Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush and then voted for Clinton. Remember, in Reagan's landslide re-election in 1984, he won all the electoral votes, except for Massachusetts and Washington, DC.

Reagan carried New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Hello, tri-state area. He carried California, Oregon, and Washington. Hello, liberal Left Coast. Any Reagan-Clinton voters want to do a little oral history on why you cast each of those votes? We would love to have you, 212-433-WNYC, or anyone else who voted Bill Clinton in 1992. Call in and remember why, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Eleanor, why was Bill Clinton elected? Why was the first George Bush a one-term president?

Eleanor Clift: Bill Clinton was elected because there was a group called the Democratic Leadership Council, the DLC, which appealed to Clinton's wonky side with developing lots of new ideas. The purpose was, though, to wrench the party back from what appeared to the voters as the far left and to bring the party back to the center. Bill Clinton campaigned on ending welfare as we know it.

Also, he took time off the campaign trail to go back to Arkansas and preside over the execution of a prisoner, a man who was so compromised mentally that he asked if he could save part of his last meal for later. Clinton was very defensive about that and said that this person actually had shot and killed, I think, a police officer, and then turned the gun on himself, which is what accounted for his disability. He felt that he was taking the right action in making him accountable for the initial murder.

Those were signals to the voters that this was a different kind of Democrat, plus he was immensely charismatic. The whole phrase that has followed him throughout his life is that he feels your pain. He could relate to the voters. There was a famous moment in the campaign during a town meeting, where George H.W. Bush was glancing at his watch impatiently, hoping it would soon be over.

Clinton is stepping forward to engage with a voter who had asked about deficits and how they mattered in her life. The senior president had no idea how to respond to that. Clinton just stepped right into it and could relate to voters. I think it was both his personality and there was some significant signals that this Democratic Party was going to be a little different than the one that had lost 49 states to Ronald Reagan.

Brian Lehrer: David, same question. Anything to add or even disagree with?

David Maraniss: I think Eleanor is right on. I think the Democratic Leadership Conference was really just a venue for Clinton. To understand him, you have to go all the way back to the dawn of his political career. He basically started in 1972 running George McGovern's campaign in Texas. From then all the way through for the next 20 years, he really spent a lot of his time trying to figure out how the Democrats could get back into power. He mastered the art of co-opting Republicans on many of their issues.

That led to his positions on crime, to the death penalty, to the Sister Souljah incident where he was taking advantage of some statements by a Black woman rapper to make himself sound more conventional about the changes in rap music. In so many different ways, he manipulated, to some extent, the public in trying to make it look like he was something that he really wasn't. On the other hand, he was never the leftist that the right wing portrayed him as either. That whole notion of Clinton as a raging anti-war leftist was equally off-base. He was just a master politician. As Eleanor said, he had charisma. He was a horse of a politician unlike any that the people who worked for him had ridden before.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, one correction. I think I said Reagan won every state, except Massachusetts and DC in 1984. I think it was actually Minnesota, which was the Democratic--

Eleanor Clift: It was Mondale's home state.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, Democratic nominee Walter Mondale's home state, Minnesota and DC. Eleanor, in generational terms, given what you were both just describing about Bill Clinton as a new centrist Democrat at the time, here is the first baby-boomer president who invokes generational change in his inaugural address. Even coming out of the baby boomer, college-student activist culture, he actually runs on less aggressive change than pre-boomer Democrats. Was that a defining moment for the generation in a way when those who were singing about revolution with the Jefferson Airplane were now making accommodations for the sake of electability with big business and some conservative social concerns?

Eleanor Clift: Well, it was not just Bill Clinton. It was Al Gore too. It was two baby boomers. It was a whole generational change. I've more read about this than have memories of it. After Dwight Eisenhower came Jack Kennedy. Suddenly, the whole country was in bright colors. The same thing happened with Clinton. There were Hollywood celebrities. It was a wonderful few months.

It didn't last very long because that first year, I think it was the first year if I remember correctly, "Don't ask, don't tell." He had promised on the campaign trail almost casually that he would overturn the military ban against gay people. Boy, that turned into a very difficult thing to do and emerged some compromise legislation that almost seemed worse than what they started out with.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, "We won't kick you out if you stay in the closet."

Eleanor Clift: Right, and then also the crime bill, he was responding to the rising crime rates and the fact that people were afraid. Washington had to do something. He also, in that Bill, had a lot of social welfare spending money. What I remember mostly was midnight basketball. They were going to keep gyms open at night in various neighborhoods so kids would have a place to go as supposed to just hang out on the streets. The Republicans turned that. They called it midnight basketball. They mocked it.

He tried to accommodate both sides. In Arkansas, he had the moniker Slick Willie, which sounds like a really negative word. He grew up in that Arkansas culture where if you wanted to accomplish a progressive end, you had to dodge and weave and do all kinds of things in order to get there. I think that's what he did in Washington as well. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it looked too transactional. It got people angry at him from both sides of the political spectrum. Again, I think David is right. He was a master politician.

Brian Lehrer: Let's hear a little voter-caller oral history. Joanne in Boonton, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Joanne.

Joanne: Hi, how are you doing, Brian? Good to talk to you. I live in deep, deep red Morris County, and it was deeper red back then if you can imagine that. I remember in '92, shortly before the election going into a movie theater and seeing a literal straw poll. They had a bucket for Bush and a bucket for Clinton. I was very surprised to see that the straws were heavily favoring Clinton. It was also amusing to walk into work after Election Day. Everybody was grumpy, except I ran into a colleague with a big grin on her face, "Hi, Sally, are you smiling for the same reason I'm smiling?" "Yes." [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: Yes, you found your kindred spirit in your workplace. Why do you think Clinton won that straw poll in deep red Morris County in the movie theater that night?

Joanne: Well, I suspect people may have been tired of Bush, Sr., and not thrilled with the Iraq War. I don't remember what movie it was, may have drawn a few more Democrats, but I suspect there may have been a small groundswell.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. That, of course, was the first Gulf War for which Bush was very popular, at least for a while, but you're saying maybe that started to backfire by then. Chris in Armonk, who voted Bush and then voted Clinton. Chris, you're on WNYC. Hi there.

Chris: Good morning, Brian. Just to put this in context, I hate to say this. I'm now 59 years old, so I was 29 when I voted for George Herbert Walker Bush. I typically vote Democratic, but I voted for George Herbert Walker Bush in '92, and then in '96, Bill Clinton. I always believe that the presidency just gets a little bit too much credit for the economy. I remembered it was all about, "The economy, stupid." I think George Herbert Walker Bush had been an admirable president.

I thought he had the levels of government. He understood how to operate the levels of government. He had a long experience. I couldn't turn my back on that compared to Bill Clinton at that time. Then, of course, I think Bill Clinton turned out to be, as I call him, RoboCop. He was just an amazing president. You couldn't knock him down. He's brilliant. I think he was a great president and he was able to work both sides of the aisle. That's why a voted for him in '96.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting, Chris. Thank you very much. One more in this set. Here's Tom in New Hyde Park, who's a Reagan and then Clinton voter. Hi, Tom, you're on WNYC.

Tom: Hi, Brian. I'm 71, registered independent, so I voted both sides of the aisle. I voted for Clinton not so much because of him or what he stood for, but I saw in the Republican Party the first stages of bringing the Christian fundamentalist right movement into politics. I draw the line at that and I have not voted for a Republican since then.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Yes, it was Pat Buchanan who helped to weaken George H.W. Bush by challenging him from the right. Pat Buchanan, who, in certain key respects, especially on immigration, was Donald Trump before Donald Trump and helped the sitting president in the primaries. That definitely contributed to his loss against Clinton. David Maraniss, any comment either on that set of callers or if you want to recall and explain to people too young to remember the expression, "It's the economy, stupid"?

David Maraniss: Well, let me go back, first of all, to the baby boom generation. When you asked about whether his election represented a transformation of that generation from the activism of the '60s, I think it did. I think it's been an arc ever since. Now, it's mind-boggling to me who was a member of that generation that it was the baby boomers who gave Donald Trump his presidency. What a transformation that has been.

I'm also thinking about 1993 as the dawn of a new age in a way that Clinton didn't really imagine yet, which was social media hadn't come to the fore yet, but Rush Limbaugh was around. Although it wasn't necessarily a conspiracy, it was the beginning of a vast right-wing movement to try to undo everything that progressive leaders were trying to do. That's only increased manifold every year since then, and really was the dawn of that in the early Clinton years. That's what he was walking into that didn't realize as part of that speech where he's talking about the marvels of technology. As you pointed out, it also led to a lot of those ugly moments.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Eleanor Clift and David Maraniss, who covered the Clinton campaign. The inauguration of Bill Clinton was 30 years ago today. We're going to play one more clip in this segment and it is not of Bill Clinton. Stay tuned and hear who it is of as we continue in a minute.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC on this 30th anniversary today of the inauguration of Bill Clinton as president of the United States. It was the first time in 12 years that the country had a Democratic president. We're remembering why. That same year, 1993, Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor of New York. The first time in 28 years, the city had elected a Republican mayor.

We are kicking off a six-part series today through next Friday here in the eleven o'clock hour about the year of Bill and Rudy and how 1993 did a lot to set up the world of 2023. Our guests in this episode one are Eleanor Clift, who covered the Clinton campaign for Newsweek back then. She's now a columnist for The Daily Beast. David Maraniss, who won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Clinton campaign for The Washington Post. He's a Washington Post associate editor these days.

Clinton won that election with only 43% of the popular vote. That's because there was a third-party candidate in that race, billionaire Ross Perot, who won no electoral votes but did get about 19% of the popular vote. By far, the most of any third-party candidate in the last century. I'm going to replay now what I'll call Ross Perot's 60 seconds of fame. The one minute of him speaking that everyone paying attention then remembers. This is from one of the televised presidential debates. Clinton and Bush and Perot. Ross Perot, the billionaire businessman, is the one sounding a warning against NAFTA, the possible free trade agreement with Mexico and Canada.

Ross Perot: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay $1 an hour for labor, hire a young 25. Let's assume you've been in business for a long time. You've got a mature workforce. Pay $1 an hour for your labor, have no health care. That's the most expensive single element in making a car, have no environmental controls, no pollution controls, and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going South.

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Ross Perot: If the people send me to Washington, the first thing I'll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it's a two-way street. One last point here. I decided I was dumb and didn't understand it, so I called the who's who of the folks who've been around it and I said, "Why won't everybody go South?" They said, "We'll be disruptive." I said, "For how long?" I finally got them up for 12 to 15 years and I said, "Well, how does it stop being disruptive?" That is when their jobs come up from $1 an hour to $6 an hour and hours go down to $6 an hour, then it's leveled again. In the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals.

Brian Lehrer: Ross Perot and his giant sucking sound, "The giant sucking sound of jobs going south of the border." On Monday's show by the way, in part two of this series, we will focus specifically on the US economy and Clinton's choices in 1993, particularly with respect to NAFTA and how it gave us the world of today in some respects. David, Perot had founded the company, Electronic Data Systems, so why was it a multinational tech billionaire who opposed open borders for capital?

David Maraniss: [laughs] Well, why was Ross Perot Ross Perot? It's funny how the arc of history moves, but what he was saying then can help explain why Donald Trump won Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin 30 years later, right?

Brian Lehrer: We have a Ross Perot caller here. John in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, John.

John: Hi, yes, you just said what I pointed out that I think that that's a pretty important thing. I think a lot of Bush voters may have went over to Perot, especially the very conservative ones, the ones that maybe later went to become Tea Party MAGA. They were really mad about the "no new taxes," "read my lips," break where he broke that promise. Ross Perot, first, he did drop out and then he came back and was a little crazier the second time than he was. I think if he wasn't in and he broke his voters down, I think it would've broken more for Bush. It might possibly have given President Bush a number of voters.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Well, Eleanor, does history know whether Perot took more votes from Clinton or from Bush?

Eleanor Clift: I'm sure the late President Bush is positive that it was Ross Perot that cost him the presidency. If you go state by state, he didn't really affect the outcome, I'm told. He did prevent Clinton from winning a majority. When Clinton ran for re-election, I think he fell short of a majority then as well. That was a prize that really eluded him. Perot had a huge impact on the Clinton White House. Clinton campaigned on a middle-class tax cut. I think he used the phrase, "The forgotten middle class," which became a staple of Donald Trump 30 years later.

What happened to that middle class in that intervening 30 years does explain a lot about where we are in politics today. I think Joe Biden is trying to rebuild that and recover some of the credibility for government and serving the people, but there's such a gap between legislations that's passed and before anybody sees any positive results. The media, we really don't do a very good job of explaining what government is doing that's positive. We're all over the negative things, but the positive things, we don't really pay much attention to. The deficit became a big issue for Bill Clinton because of Ross Perot. He put that on the map.

David Maraniss: That's right. As a matter of fact, it was the major debate within the Clinton camp as that inauguration was taking place. There were already the deficit box within his new administration or winning the argument that they couldn't do the middle-class tax cut because of the deficit.

Brian Lehrer: Larry in Brooklyn remembers the Clinton campaign in 1992. Hi, Larry. You're on WNYC.

Larry: Hey, hi. Yes, I told your screener. I thought Bill's genius, as liberals in Park Slope in Brooklyn Heights where I live on the Upper East Side, became more and more affluent with the value shift that tends to come with that. Bill Clinton gave them permission to be conservative but call themselves liberals. Look at Clinton's position from almost every significant position in his administration. He was to the right of Richard Nixon. Bill Clinton was a conservative, plain and simple, who billed himself and sold himself to liberals as a liberal and, as I said, gave them permission to be conservatives without having to really do an examination of conscience about that. I voted for him too, yes.

Brian Lehrer: How quickly did you come to the conclusion that you just articulated that he was really a conservative giving liberals permission to be conservative?

Larry: At the time, you vote for him because of the same reason. A lot of us voted for Joe Biden because he's not the other guy.

Brian Lehrer: Eleanor, do you think that's fair or is that painting with too broad a brush about Bill Clinton calling him a conservative in liberals' clothes?

Eleanor Clift: Yes. Well, he did move to the center on economic issues and on crime and on welfare. He signed the welfare reform bill after vetoing it twice and top officials in his administration resigned over that. I think, at one point, Clinton said that it was a good piece of legislation wrapped in a sack of S-H-I-T, I think is the exact quote.

He signed it and it guaranteed his re-election in 1996. He made the moves that he had to to reclaim some power for the Democrats as opposed to turning over the whole agenda to the other side. People who are pure New Deal, liberal Democrats never forgave Clinton for the concessions that he made. I cut him a lot of slack because I think it would've been a lot worse if he was not there doing what he did.

Brian Lehrer: David, I was reading last night one of your articles from during the campaign that helped win you that Pulitzer called Clinton's Approach to Racial Matters: Conflicting Impulses. I think you touched on it briefly before, but what were some of those conflicting impulses?

David Maraniss: Well, I think that when you look at the idealistic side of Bill Clinton, historically, it started with issues of race growing up in segregated Arkansas and trying to move the South past that horrible, segregated existence into something new. He always maintained that idealism on race. Lust, it conflicted too much with his ambition. Bill Clinton's entire career is a hyperventilated clash between ambition and idealism. There were certain points when ambition won.

That's why, as Eleanor said, he went back to Arkansas to oversee the death of a mentally-impaired convict. It's why he did the Sister Souljah dressing-down. It's why he and Hillary turned against one of their first appointees, Lani Guinier, when she became racially controversial. There were various moments when that clash became just overwhelming, but I always have maintained that the better side of Bill Clinton was his idealism on issues of race. It only accentuated those times when he turned against his own instincts because his main desire was to win.

Brian Lehrer: Conflicting impulses. One more call. Deborah in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Deborah. You're remembering Bill Clinton's inauguration in the 1992 campaign, right?

Deborah: Yes, absolutely. Good morning. Thank you for taking my call. At the time of his campaign, I was a senior in high school. I grew up in Central New Jersey. With two other friends of mine, we were total political nerds. We had gone down to DC under Bush's administration to rally against-- I believe it was Casey. The Supreme Court case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. When the DNC was going to be in New York very close to where we lived, we came in, we campaigned, went to rallies, and we were able to get into the convention every night.

I got onto the floor the night that Clinton, I guess, was nominated by forging passes because the technology was so different than it was today. We even sold some to offset our costs for our stay in New York, which our parents had no idea where we were staying. We didn't even know where we were staying, but my greatest regret is I turned 18 freshman year of college, 15 days. I remember it was November 3rd, 1992. I didn't turn 18 until the 18th, but my dorm room was plastered with Clinton posters.

Brian Lehrer: You campaigned for him, but you couldn't vote. What do you think looking back for you, high point, low point? Do you look back thinking, "Man, he did a great job," or "Oh, that Bill Clinton, he had such promise," or something in between?

Deborah: An early crush. It's hard to crush out. I would say low point was the, "Don't ask, don't tell." That was very disappointing. Obviously, the Monica Lewinsky situation, but I think a high point with him being able to really achieve consensus. Particularly, I believe that was the rise of Newt Gingrich. I think one of your guests wrote a book, but he really was able to put the identity of an electable moderate as a possibility. We become, even within the Democratic Party, so isolated from one another. He really made it a big tent, not without, for sure, policy disappointment.

Brian Lehrer: Deborah, thank you very much. To wrap up part one of the six-part series on the year of Bill and Rudy, how 1993 helped give us the world of 2023, what would you say in a nutshell is how one biggest way or one overarching thought, David Maraniss, of how the world of 1993, all the politics of Bill Clinton that we've been talking about, and we'll start talking about Rudy on Monday, has given us the world of 2023?

David Maraniss: Well, as I said earlier, I think it really was the dawn of a new age in ways that Bill Clinton didn't really realize in 1993 on terms of the rise of a divisive and really angry and sometimes effective right-wing against him and against Democratic policy. I think overall with Bill Clinton, that central question was always for people who liked him if only. If only he hadn't done certain things, he could have been a great president. My philosophy about that has always been, you can't separate the good from the bad in Bill Clinton. The same forces that drove him to his success also drove him in other ways.

Brian Lehrer: Eleanor, last 30 seconds--

Eleanor Clift: I'm going to go back to--

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Eleanor Clift: Yes, I'm going to go back to what one of your callers said earlier. You couldn't knock him down. He ran in 1992 after Democrat Michael Dukakis had been beaten up about the ACLU and the Pledge of Allegiance and Boston Harbor pollution. The Democrats didn't effectively counterpunch. Clinton came onto the scene ready to instant response, rapid response, hit back.

If you don't hit back the criticism, the attacks are going to stick. He was impeached and he kept saying, "I'm going to go back and do the work for the American people." His polls went up. He was actually in the low 60s after the Republicans impeached him. I think the lesson for today and I think we're seeing it play out with a Republican House now, saying that they're going to impeach various cabinet officials and maybe even the President himself.

You see a counterattack machine belatedly forming on the Democratic side that is a replica of what the Clinton people put in place when he was facing all those investigations, Whitewater, which morphed into several other investigations. I think the lessons we learned under Clinton, you got to fight back. I'm sorry that that's the dominant ethos. I wish it were bipartisanship instead. I'm going to keep rooting for bipartisanship, especially to raise the debt ceiling because they could crash the world economy if they don't. I think Fight Club is more the atmosphere that we're in.

Brian Lehrer: Fight Club, the last words in this segment from Eleanor Clift. Folks, there you have it, part one of this six-part series, which will continue every day next week on the year of Bill and Rudy, how 1993 helped to give us the world of 2023. Monday, we'll look more closely at Clintonomics and the role of the New York City economy in the Dinkins-Giuliani campaign.

For now, we thank Eleanor Clift, these days, a columnist for The Daily Beast, and David Maraniss, associate editor of The Washington Post. He's got a recent book, so I'm going to mention it. David is a master biographer of different kinds of people and his latest is Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe. Thank you both so much for joining us for this.

Eleanor Clift: Thank you.

David Maraniss: Thank you, Brian.

 

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