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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now part five of our six-part series, The Year of Bill and Rudy - How 1993 helped give us the World of 2023. Bill Clinton became President event 30 years ago this week, January 20th, 1993. Later that same year, Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor. Why did America move left and the city move right? How did those choices help give us the world and the issues we're living with today? What can we learn from the choices the nation and the city made then for those we face today, especially on the economy and crime?

For today's installment, it's what we call a Brian Lehrer Show editorial board segment, where we convene three thoughtful people with different takes or areas of expertise and see if we can learn something from each other, maybe even draw some conclusions. With us now are Ruth Messinger. In 1993, she was the Manhattan Borough president. She went on to be the Democratic nominee for mayor against Giuliani in 1997, and after he was reelected, Ruth went on to become president and CEO of the American Jewish World Service for 18 years.

The AJWS described itself as the leading Jewish organization working to fight poverty and pursue justice in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean through philanthropy and advocacy. Also Jonathan Capehart, associate editor of The Washington Post, host of the podcast Capehart and The Washington Post Live's First Look, and host of the Sunday Show 10:00 AM to noon Eastern on MSNBC on Sundays, and Harry-- Oh, and by the way, Jonathan in 1993 was a member of the New York Daily News actual editorial board.

Harry Siegel, current columnist for the Daily News, senior editor at the news organization The City, and co-host of their New York politics podcast, FAQ NYC. Harry was 16 years old in 1993 by my calculation, so his coming-of-age take from that time should be interesting. Also, his father, Fred Siegel, was a prominent conservative scholar and commentator at the time, which says nothing about Harry's politics, which are his own, but Harry collaborated with his father on the 2005 book The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life. Harry, Jonathan, Ruth, always great to have all of you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jonathan Capehart: Thanks, Brian.

Harry Siegel: Thanks, Brian.

Ruth Messinger: Thanks, Brian. This is Ruth. I apologize for my cold. Hello, Jonathan. Hello, Harry. Harry, I'm now, as the British say, gobsmacked. It never occurred to me that you were Fred's son.

Harry Siegel: Me too.

Ruth Messinger: I love your weekly column and now I have to reprocess who you are in my head.

Jonathan Capehart: Good mistake.

Brian Lehrer: Whether that's a good thing or not, let's do a little oral history with each of you and then kick around some ideas about what we can learn about today from this 30-year lens on history. Jonathan Capehart, the Daily News editorial board backed Bill Clinton for president and Rudy Giuliani for mayor in that one-year span. I know that doesn't mean you personally held either of those positions, but you were on the editorial board in 1993. Give us some oral history as you recall it. What would have led the paper to endorse the Democrat for president and the Republican for mayor at the time?

Jonathan Capehart: Well, keep in mind, I didn't-- Brian, it's great to be back, and Madam President, nice to hear your voice, and, Harry, great to be on with you. I joined the New York Daily News editorial board in August of 1993, and so I came into the editorial board right smack at the middle of the start of what we're about to talk about. I'm trying to remember because I was at the Today Show from '92 to '93.

Brian Lehrer: And at WNYC before that. Just needed to throw that in there, but go ahead, Jonathan.

Jonathan Capehart: That's right, but I do know, if memory serves, the discrepancy in terms of endorsing President Clinton, a Democrat for president, and endorsing Rudy Giuliani, a Republican for mayor in that particular race it had, I believe, everything to do with crime, and I say that because I joined the board. The campaign is up and running, Rudy wins, and then the entire focus at the time was crime cleaning up the city and also economic development, and so I think when it came to endorsing Rudy Giuliani, it was very parochial.

I think the editorial board's view was very New York City focused what the editors and the folks and the board felt was important for the city, and I sort of hesitate because, like I said, I was brand new. Harry may have been 16, but I believe I was about 24 or 25 years old when I joined the Ed board at the New York Daily News, and so I was brand spanking new.

Brian Lehrer: What kind of an education was that for you coming in in the middle of that campaign?

Jonathan Capehart: It was truly incredible because they hired me and said, "If this is the kind of writing you'd like to do, this will be an incredible learning experience for you," and they didn't lie because I ended up having a front-row seat. Now, with 30 years of hindsight, a front-row seat to the changing of New York, both from an economic development perspective, a crime perspective, societal perspective, and having a seat at the table where the opinion of one of the city's papers in a lot of ways helped drive a lot of things that happened in the city during Giuliani's mayoralty.

Brian Lehrer: Ruth Messinger, you were reelected in '93 as Manhattanburg president when Giuliani was elected mayor, and you were, I think it's fair to say, one of the leaders of the social justice left in the city in those days in many respects. Do you think there were Giuliani Messinger voters in Manhattan in a way that said something about the city at the time?

Ruth Messinger: I don't think we ever did any polling on that. Brian it certainly is possible. Harry was 16. Jonathan was brand new. I was about 104 then and I'm about 237 now. When your staff contacted me I thought, 1993, what was I doing then? Anyway, I think it's possible. I want to say that what Jonathan said, I think that and I can't speak for the Daily News editorial board, but I think that there was a huge race factor in the endorsement and in the public switch from Dinkins to Giuliani.

It's been said many times, I know you know this, but as tough as it is to fight crime and we're certainly seeing that again today, crime statistics had actually improved in the last four months of the Lincoln administration before the election. That's not the kind of thing that makes its way to the public mind quickly. There had been crime problems, but I want to say without again speaking for the Daily News specifically, I think there was a, "Okay, we've done it. We've had our Black mayor. He didn't solve all our problems. Crime is bad. He's been a little soft on some issues, so this tough guy looks good." I think that was on many people's minds, conscious or unconscious, without really thinking through some of the implications of a, quote-unquote, "get tough on crime Republican mayor."

Brian Lehrer: I see from their editorial endorsing Giuliani at the time, it said, "Ultimately, this is an election about who can govern, not who can stitch a patchwork of symbols into a feel-good cloth." Then when you were the Democratic nominee against Giuliani in 1997, he won reelection. Would you say you were trying to be a social justice candidate in a law and order time?

Ruth Messinger: First of all, I don't think those two are exclusive.

Brian Lehrer: Fair enough.

Ruth Messinger: I think that's a bad way to put the question. My attitude toward Giuliani going to, let's say, 1995, was to have been impressed with the way in which he introduced a high level of accountability in the police department, which basically had thought before and still thinks now that it runs the city and that it runs the mayor. I thought Giuliani was doing an amazing job of saying what actually matters are the crime statistics. What actually matters is to Mr. or Ms. Commanding Officer in a particular precinct, what's happening in your jurisdiction.

I said, even before I made the decision to run, "I fervently hope that Mayor Giuliani will move that level of intense accountability to someone of the many other areas of New York City governance that is a little too loose, a little too untransparent," whatever that means. I would've hoped that he would've done it for the book education system, but I said at the time, I remember, if he did it for housing, if he did it for health, if we could get that level of accountability, we could tighten up some of where this very large budget gets spent and what's good and what's bad about what we're doing. I felt like he did nothing. This is a very strong statement, but I'll make it anyway.

Once he felt he had pulled the police department into some level of control, it turned out in my judgment that there was not very much else under his jurisdiction other than economic development, which I know you want to talk about, that there was not much else that was of interest. Although the '97 campaign will go down or up in flames, and we didn't get very much coverage, but I get this moment to say I ran almost that entire campaign on the dreadful problems of education and the slightly less dreadful, but pretty bad problems with higher education in the City of New York.

Brian Lehrer: Do you want to finish the thought? Go ahead.

Ruth Messinger: No, I just think it would've made a difference if we had had a mayor who focused on the lives of 1.1 million schoolchildren.

Brian Lehrer: Harry Siegel, you were 12 the year David Dinkins was elected, 16 the year Giuliani was elected. Can you give us some moral history of where you were growing up, what it was like, and what kind of talk you were hearing, maybe in your parents' political circles or your friends, if you were in political circles as a teenager paying attention at all as a kid of those ages?

Harry Siegel: Brian, it was a really different city, of course. Look, at the time, there were all these guys going around, big guys, adults and much older teens on tiny BMX bikes. These weren't guys who were doing bike tricks. It was one of those weird things like real saggy pants that start off because you don't have belts at that point in prison and then this becomes a street trend. The people were taking kids' bikes, and that was my one experience as a kid in much less gentrified Park Slope on 5th Street and 5th Avenue. A guy came up to me, shoved me while I was riding on my bike at 4:00 in the afternoon - I went flying into a fence and cut up my face - and rode off with my bike.

Other people were riding bikes like that because it was a trend. Crime had started to decline by 1993. We're still talking about nearly 2,000 murders a year. It was a pretty wild city. At the time, if I wanted to go out and get some not licensed, definitely not legal weed, and I'm not saying I was, it was bodegas, it was every fruit store. This was before the internet. Just an entirely different culture and economy at the time. My father who thought of himself he was a mentee of Irving House. He'd come from the socialist left, and he thought of himself, still does, as a disappointed liberal rather than a conservative. I won't speak for that.

I would be hearing these conversations when I was around and paying attention about what a deep hole the city was in and how much trouble and how you had a mayor who had inherited a very tough position after upsetting Koch in the 1989 primary. Giuliani had actually anticipated running against Koch, not Dinkins, and in '89 was thinking, well, I can pull off 30%, 20% optimistically of the Black vote. By '93, that ship has sailed. I think the city for people who know it now and were not there then is almost unimaginably different. Its politics were. For me, it was a wonderful place to roam around.

Sometimes things would feel ominous or dangerous, but what do you know at 16? It's just the city you're living in. I do remember the World Trade Center bombing, the first one, that February.

Brian Lehrer: 1993.

Harry Siegel: I had not dropped out of Stuyvesant yet. I was actually on the bridge. It shook as this happened. There was a lot in that era that I think augurs where we ended up, not least by the way, Rudy Giuliani saying, not long afterwards, as Michael Tomasky recently recalled, "They stole that election from me. They stole votes in the Black parts of Brooklyn and in Washington Heights."

Then in 1997, by the way, Al Sharpton running in the Democratic primary against Ruth Messinger, and like 600 or so votes determining whether or not there's going to be a runoff, he ends up suing, and his lawyer says, "There was such substantial fraud and irregularities. It's impossible to have a determination of who was rightfully nominated." Sort of a reminder, one, of where the politics of the Democratic party were at that time, but two, that these sort of voter fraud fights everyone's involving Rudy, and people around him have a very long disturbing history.

Brian Lehrer: I guess so. Any memories, Harry, as a teenager of Bill Clinton's first year in office in 1993 and the talk you were hearing in some liberal or conservative or ex-liberal circles? Were people buying his new Democrat centrism as the big tent future Clinton was trying to create politically or rejecting him as either still just another liberal or a sellout as some people on the left thought?

Harry Siegel: This was the era of the DLC/PPI and the centrist Democrats like New Labour ended up being in England, who were going to cross over. There was all of this common DNA between the parties. The year after Giuliani is elected, very interestingly, he backs Mario Cuomo for the fourth term as governor, who's running against some guy, state lawmaker, George Pataki, whoever, and Pataki of course ends up winning. This newly elected Republican mayor who at the time at least acted like he had some liberal ideas and sympathies on some issues, very much not on race, but on other fronts was there, cosmopolitan.

There was this sense that people could cross over and make deals between the parties and good things could happen with that. Quentin, of course, after losing the house, we end up with his crime bill. Lots of more cops, and that's going to be the answer in that basketball, and welfare reform. Which Giuliani, of course, does in a pretty brutal way in the city saying, this is full of bureaucracy and fraud, and we're just going to make it much harder for people to get in. Aided by a rising economy, the claims of the time that this was going to really immediately damage people didn't immediately come true.

I think with the hindsight of time, that feels different, but it was certainly an era and I was in and out of paying attention to this and just paying attention to my own teenage life, where there seemed to be somewhat more common ground between the parties and an idea in cities that the Democrats on the left had had a 30 year run to get things right. Things had gotten out of control, and flash forwarding to now and our second Black mayor, it is not, I think an accident that we often have Black mayors elected in New York in really difficult circumstances where suddenly less help is coming from Washington and they're appealing for more of that.

There was the famous post headline "Dave, Do Something About Crime," but particularly on the economic front, he was saying the government has to do more, that they've abandoned public housing, they're not supporting the schools in the way they were, the federal government, and we need the support. Adams, who was a former Republican himself, who is in a different position, but also all this federal aid, billions and billions of dollars, is going away. The out-year deficits are huge.

All these migrants are coming here, and he's appealing very openly to other Democrats in Washington and in Albany, "We need help. We need money," and they're doing as little as possible to help and leaving him in a very difficult position however effective he is at dominating the stage and swaggering to figure these things out and get things done. As we know that did not end well politically speaking the first time New York went through that exercise.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting connection with today. Folks, we've heard a little oral history from Harry Siegel, Ruth Messinger, and Jonathan Capehart. We're going to take a very short break then come back and I will toss out a discussion question or two, maybe a hypothesis or two about how 1993 did set us up for the world of 2023, and what we can learn from these stories from 30 years ago that we're hearing. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we are in Part 5e of our six-part series. The Year of Bill and Rudy - How 1993 Helped Set up the World of 2023. 1993 was the year that Bill Clinton took office as president and Rudy Giuliani was elected as mayor. Ruth Messinger is with us who was Manhattan Borough president in 1993. Jonathan Capehart now with The Washington Post. He was on The Daily News editorial board in 1993. Harry Siegel, as we were just hearing, was a kid and is now senior editor at the News Organization, The City, a daily news columnist, and co-host of the podcast FAQ NYC. We've heard some oral history from each of you.

Now, let me throw out a couple of thought bubbles for all of you to kick around a little bit with each other. This one is very broad. What do you each think we're most living with today as a legacy of Giuliani's mayoralty or Clinton's presidency at the policy level, never mind their messy personal lives? Did either of them solve anything once and for all or raise new questions that we're still trying to answer? Ruth Messinger, do you want to take a shot at that first?

Ruth Messinger: Yes. Well, I might be accused of being a Democrat here, which I am. Happy to say I am, but I think there's no coherent legacy from Giuliani. First of all, as I said, I think there were huge parts of the city for which he was responsible. It ended up for eight years that he did very little about and if it had not been for his quite challenging but reasonable interventions after 9/11, I think people would've ended up saying, "Actually, what did we get out of our eight years?"

I don't see much legacy from what he actually did in the city and, of course, his role since then. It's not just his personal life, Brian. It's like there's nothing coherent about him and he looks pretty crazy through most of the Trump years. I think that that tends to wash out anything that he might have done. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Ruth Messinger: I think that's a little different. Look, I think one of the things you're pointing out here, and Harry and Jonathan each commented on this also is that one of the challenges of actually trying to have a democracy is that every four years and sometimes every two years in Congressional elections, you think, "Oh, well, we tried that brand. Let's try the other brand." It's not just switching party. It's switching type and orientation, but I think that Clinton made serious efforts to work with Congress in different ways to look at more broadly at the country.

I think we benefited from having had a previous experience as an executive, not just a legislator, but whatever it is, 30 years later, you're able to draw clear connections and comparisons. I think there are very few, although I agree with the point that I think Harry made a few minutes ago that it is interesting that the city went again to elect a Black mayor at a time of huge challenge. That's a side remark, but I think there's more sense of Clinton, and also Clinton has done everything he could in a very different way than Giuliani, but a somewhat more successful way to stay somewhat in the public eye and mind with programs, with statements of endorsements, at least until about five years ago.

Brian Lehrer: Jonathan as someone who was in New York then who's been in Washington for a long time since, a foot in both cities, where would you enter that conversation?

Jonathan Capehart: When it comes to Giuliani and I don't know if Ruth remembers, but I was writing columns in addition to a lot of our editorials during the 1997 mayoral race and to my mind, the big issue was had the city improved over the four years? There was, from our perspective, no doubt and no question that the city had improved between 1993 and '97, particularly when it came to crime, but to pick up on something that Ruth said in terms of 9/11 and the attacks in 9/11, Brian, you may remember that on that date, I was serving as a policy advisor to a local businessman by the name of Mike Bloomberg who was running for the Republican nomination for mayor and 9/11 was primary day.

Among the many vivid memories I have of that day, including the crisp, beautiful blue sky earlier that morning, was the sense as I was walking to the polls to vote for Mike in the primary, was how I was so looking forward to the beginning of the end of the Giuliani era. I think a lot of people in New York felt that way, that we were beginning to see the end of this operatic, which had become at that point just exhaustion at how he was running the city relating to New Yorkers, badgering New Yorkers, particularly Black [unintelligible 00:25:48].

Ruth Messinger: Divorcing his wife at a press conference. Don't forget that.

Brian Lehrer: Doing what?

Ruth Messinger: Divorcing his wife at a press conference.

Jonathan Capehart: Oh, yes. There was so much, but Brian, when I look back on Rudy's eight years as mayor, and I look at Donald Trump's campaign for president and four years as president, this is a column I never sat down to write, but I've thought about it during the entirety of Trump's presidency. Watching Donald Trump serve as president reminded me so much of Rudy Giuliani as mayor. A lot of Trump's horrible tendencies, demeanor, his treatment of the press, his treatment of his, quote-unquote, "enemies or adversaries," we saw previewed by Giuliani as mayor of New York City.

If there is any, to my mind, the legacy of Rudy Giuliani was providing a template for Donald Trump to use when he got elected president of the United States, and we're still living the consequences of that.

Ruth Messinger: Brian, I want to comment on that. I think that is brilliantly true. I want to add two perspectives to that. One, I had occasion, and there's a way to google it if you want, which I had totally forgotten, a Sunday morning news show that I did with Donald Trump. It must have been in the early 1980s, in fact, to that over the question of tax breaks for the Commodore Hotel. It's worth watching that news show because this brash, young real estate person kept saying to me, "Your facts are wrong. Where did you get that information? The New York Times lies." All of the things that turned into fake news and go on the assault were present in that news interview. I never would've remembered it.

It was just like one more Sunday morning experience except that it got captured and picked up by British Channel 4, and they turned it into a piece of their show about Trump. I want to say one other thing is really right to point out the connection and as you say, the legacy of Rudy Giuliani showing up and Donald Trump, but that legacy gets credited, or in my mind, mis- and discredited to Roy Cohn. The tactics that Joe McCarthy, Donald Trump, and Rudy Giuliani used are cut from exactly the same [unintelligible 00:28:43] and book, and it's all the advice of Roy Cohn. There's a recent documentary about him that basically says that indeed that's what he told everybody. Pick a scapegoat, attack, attack, attack, lie and tell people they're crazy when they attack.

Brian Lehrer: Well, Harry, let me turn this in a adjunct or adjacent direction. After Clinton and Giuliani came into office, crime went down in the city and nationally and the economy boomed in the city and nationally. This was due in part-- Oh, okay. Hypothesis and alternative hypothesis. Let me put it this way. Hypothesis. This was due in part to a healthy mix of Democratic and Republican sensibilities having come to power. Alternative hypothesis. Those 1990s improvements were from larger forces that had little to do with either man. Do you accept either of those hypotheses?

Harry Siegel: I emphatically accept both of them and that's the big question, is does it matter who's steering the ship? How much is that person? How much is the waves and broader forces? [unintelligible 00:29:52] we're in peace about this. With Giuliani's legacy, one small thing and one big thing. The small thing, and I say small because it was totally accidental, as Ruth mentioned, he was not very concerned with the schools. His main thing with the schools was abusing his chancellors, particularly this guy Ray Cortines, and in railing against the old board of education.

As Jonathan will recall, Albany will not give Giuliani control of the schools because he's so operatic and insane and unpleasant about all this, but as soon as Mike Bloomberg is elected, that happens. That happens because Giuliani had spent eight years pointing out what an inefficient, unaccountable operation this was, that wasn't in the interest of New York schoolchildren. He was doing this for his own brutalist reasons. I don't think he thought all that much about it, but he happened to be right, and he actually set the stage for that to happen. More broadly, how much credit he gets for this is a super complicated question.

We know that the drop in crime in New York is steeper and longer than the national drop, that it happens as slightly fewer people are getting incarcerated here, even as the city becomes progressively safer, but that really is transformative. The idea is that there's going to be this eight-year interregnum, like a break glass in case of emergency with this guy, and then we're going to go back to Democrats.

In the course of those eight years, and I think this is widely forgotten now, Giuliani largely and very much in spite of himself and his operatic insanity, and his wife finding out they're splitting up from his press conference, the non-run against Hillary Clinton, all this madness, he easily wins reelection in 1997, and in the summer of 2001, he's polling at over 55%. This wasn't like a Winston Churchill thanks for winning the war, we're good thing. 20 years of really terrible Giuliani [unintelligible 00:31:56] and all those things were there from the start, from when he was a US attorney, and having these press conferences, and leaking to the press, which consequently loved him, and unethical ways.

He does not leave disgraced and discredited and significantly his endorsement, along with a lot of other circumstances, including 9/11, a racist New York Post cartoon, Mark Green's hubris, but critically Rudy Giuliani's endorsement in that moment have a ton to do with Mike Bloomberg, who's not really a Republican, but he's also not a Democrat. He is an exemplar of the business class being elected and that interregnum ending up being 20 years. Now that we've had a decade of Democratic mayors and full democratic control of the city again, the narrative including from Mayor Eric Adams is, "There's nothing to be learned from Giuliani. The man really left no legacy."

It's not that everything that happened on his watch happened because of him. A lot of the genius of politics is being in the right place at the right time. As the waves are rising, then you say I've lifted the ocean.

Brian Lehrer: That's really interesting. Are you saying that Eric Adams, who was elected on a control crime platform, echoes of Giuliani in 1993, says there is nothing to learn from Giuliani's policies?

Harry Siegel: Yes. He actually starts his group 100 Black Men in Law Enforcement in response to the election of Giuliani. Eric Adams isn't at the NYPD at the time, but he is a political figure within the NYPD. They have their own contentious relationship, but Adams knows better. Adams actually talks a lot about how much he learned from Jack Maple, who was the architect of the CompStat strategy that came in when Bill Bratton was there. The fact that matter is Giuliani is so appalling in his ethical, personal and political behavior these days, I very much understand not wanting to publicly credit him with anything, but there's a certain absurdity to that.

If you run on public safety saying the mayor who had this tremendous success in increasing public safety, that even as he basically didn't pay attention on much else, unlocked all this economic development, that there's nothing to learn from him or he has no legacy, I get it politically, but I don't think it's serious or credible.

Brian Lehrer: We have to take one more break, then we'll continue. It's interesting. I threw out a general question about the Clinton-Giuliani era and you all went to Giuliani. I'm going to flip the script a little bit and bring in the Clinton aspect of it when we continue in a minute.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we are in part five of our six-part series The Year of Bill and Rudy - How 1993 Helped Give Us the World of 2023. Bill Clinton became president 30 years ago this week, January 20th, 1993. Later that same year, Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor. We're in what we call a Brian Lehrer Show editorial board segment, as we tried to synthesize some of what we've been hearing from various guests throughout this week, and maybe even draw some conclusions about that era's impact on this year, with three really smart people, Ruth Messinger, who was Manhattan Borough President in 1993, Jonathan Capehart, who was on The Daily News editorial board in 1993, now Washington Post associate editor, and Harry Siegel, who was a kid growing up in a political household in 1993 and now is with the news organization The City and a Daily News columnist.

Ruth, next hypothesis, Bill Clinton's compromises with the right made it much harder for Hillary Clinton to win election against Trump. As the moderate candidate against Bernie Sanders and then against Trump, the shadow of her husband's compromises on crime and poverty and trade, denied her a certain amount of trust and turnout. Competing hypothesis, Clinton as a two-term president who presided over pretty good times has set the template for what Democrats should follow at the national level.

Ruth Messinger: These hypotheses are so complicated, Brian, that we could do two hours on any one of them.

Brian Lehrer: True.

Ruth Messinger: I'm going to take the cop-out that was taken before, I actually think both of those are true.

Brian Lehrer: I love that answer actually, but go ahead.

Ruth Messinger: The second one first, I think given the pension in the United States for term limits, which have their pros and their cons, I think it was an impressive eight years with a lot of efforts, and with some serious work with the right and the center. We are now living through, and Harry has actually written about this a few times and maybe Jonathan has as well, the lunacy of a bunch of elected officials in the so-called democracy who won't compromise on anything. It's really quite terrifying for the city. I think that, from my point of view, the Clinton era including compromises that I, quote-unquote, "didn't like" shows that you have to compromise to govern the country.

With all due respect to Joe Biden, that's what he said when he was running. People went berserk. You would actually talk to a Republican, but that's the way you have to function if you're trying to maintain a stable democracy. On the first hypothesis, which I think goes in a different direction, I just think it's really impossibly difficult. First of all, it's impossibly difficult, as we've seen, for a woman to run a campaign for executive position in New York and nationally.

Yes, Hillary was saddled by everything about her husband, people who loved him and thought she wasn't nearly as nice and as warm as him, the people who were mesmerized by him and weren't mesmerized by her, the people who thought he, as you say, made too many compromises, so she couldn't be a more serious center-left candidate, but also the people who thought that he was soft on everything, and she was just going to be worse because she was a woman.

Harry Siegel: Ruth, I know you have to jump off. Thank you so much for joining.

Ruth Messinger: Brian, I just got note from the person I'm having lunch with, so I can stay until noon.

Harry Siegel: You can stay until the top of the hour. All right. Well, then, Jonathan, same question.

Jonathan Capehart: The question was so long. I'm just going to pick and choose what I want to answer. I'll pick up on what Ruth was just talking about in terms of Hillary Clinton. I would also add to the critique that she had a dedicated media arm and conservative movement that was out every day bashing her to the point when she did run for president in her own right, there had been nearly three decades worth of animosity and suspicion that was built up in the American psyche, not just on the right, but plenty of people in the middle and some on the left.

Broadly speaking, when it comes to the legacy of President Clinton, I look at it from the perspective of being a young person viewing a relatively young man who was president of the United States, an elected Democrat, and who spoke to issues that spoke to me, most importantly, and I wrote about it at the time, when he tried to engage the nation in a national conversation on race. Went nowhere in the grand scheme of things, but by just engaging in the conversation, he pushed the country tom at a minimum, try to focus in on some of its inner demons.

His willingness to talk about those issues in ways that no president had ever tried to talk about them maybe since Johnson, I think endeared him to certainly the African American Community and that affinity that African Americans have, particularly older African Americans have for President Clinton remains. My Aunt Lillian who just passed away last Saturday, I was able to get her into a White House holiday party during one of the last years of the Obama presidency. One of the first things she said when she saw all the portraits of the president's, she said, "Where's Bill?"

We got to where Bill Clinton's portrait hanged, and she wanted her picture taken with it, and she said that she wanted Hillary to run for president because that would mean Bill would be back in the White House. He had such a hold on African Americans and a delight that the community has for him. One other thing which I don't think Ruth brought up, but when Bill Clinton left the White House the most enduring legacy that he left the country was a massive budget surplus for the first time in recent memory. As we all know, it was frittered her way in Bush tax cuts and other things.

Brian Lehrer: Harry, you want to keep going.

Harry Siegel: There was the whole idea of Bill Clinton. I know Toni Morrison wrote about it at one point as our first Black president and obviously, that does not survive Hillary Clinton's first run for president like a really rough primary against Barack Obama. Quentin is just conventional terms like a successful two-term president. The economy does pretty well. He wins re-election. We are broadly speaking at peace not engaged in major wars and that's a lot. To get there, he makes all sorts of deals with Republicans. He needs to govern up the time. This is also the end of the era when lawmakers actually passed laws.

Part of the reason we have so much hostage-taking now, and this does have to do with increased radicalism and many more contests being decided in primaries, not to be symmetrical between the parties, but that's an issue, is in Washington as in Albany almost all the law-making stuff now gets done in gigantic spending bills where that can be hidden and you don't actually have to vote on the difficult thing that you're nominally running on. I think in a lot of ways, it's actually very healthy to [unintelligible 00:43:15] the past and politically successful people with the passage of time.

You look back at Bill Clinton and you consider how he treated women, the compromises he was willing to make often at the, I would argue and I think many people have the expense of Black people in cities to win political points and to move forward a larger agenda. Even if that's successful in the whole, going back and reconsidering these figures and their merits and how you extend those things, I think is always a worthy and honorable exercise. I do think it is frustrating 30 years later to see the diminishment of any cross-aisle politics and maybe that's just about the madness in my view of the Republican Party at this point.

Brian Lehrer: You know what? That's going to have to be the last word because we're out of time, but it also promotes tomorrow's final segment in this series, which is going to be, how the election of Bill Clinton drove the right crazy in a way that I think we're still living with to today? Good talk, you guys. Harry Siegel, Ruth Messinger, Jonathan Capehart. Wow, that was amazing. We'll have to do this again sometime. Thank you all so much for devoting so much time to us today.

Jonathan Capehart: Thanks, Brian.

Ruth Messinger: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

 

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