MORGAN, Ben

Two for the Price of One: The Clintons as Celebrity Couple

 

The Clintons were always a couple in America’s imagination, and the dynamics of their marriage became – with the open collaboration of the media – the dynamics of American domestic policy in the mid 90s. This paper will consider two major aspects of the Clinton phenomenon.

First, it will look at the way the Clintons became, and offered themselves as, a new paradigm of domestic life – becoming, like all celebrities, an emanation of the collective unconscious. When Bill and Hillary told America that their marriage history matched that of millions of couples – the defence they raised against the Gennifer Flowers allegations that almost sabotaged the Clinton nomination – they asked America to look at them and see itself. But to become a psychic mirror of a nation that was tormented about the meaning of traditional partnerships during the gender battleground of the 90s was to ask for an unstable and consuming form of celebrity. Looking at transcripts and records of talk shows of the period I will show how their marriage escaped their own narrative and became part of a national conversation.

Second, I will look at a scenario unique to the Clintons – the combustible intersection between pop-culture iconography and actual political power. Unlike other celebrity couples, they were writing the legal and political history of their nation. Examining the Republican attacks on them during their time in office, their own memoirs, and contemporary sources such as Taylor Branch’s The Clinton Tapes, I will suggest that the sexual power struggle in their marriage became, by a process stranger and more compelling than mere rhetoric, a way of thinking about political power itself, its sources, its compulsions and its effects in a media culture where the distinction between description and event was eroding to nothing.

 

Dr. Ben Morgan is a Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.