“I never thought I’d be praising Bill Clinton on The Daily Caller’s website,” conservative policy intellectual and presidential historian Tevi Troy confides in an interview with TheDC about his new book, “What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House.”
But the former Bush administration official says “looking at presidential uses of pop culture gave me a new and unexpected appreciation for Clinton.”
“He was groundbreaking in his use of music on his campaign — think of his saxophone playing on ‘The Arsenio Hall Show,’ and the endless repetitions of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow),'” Troy said, arguing Clinton was the most culturally in-touch president in American history. “He loved movies, and could discuss films with the best of them. He was a huge and wide ranging reader, who loved mysteries, policy books and serious literature. But he also knew how to appeal to the common man, and didn’t get too high-minded or snobbish about things.”
Troy, who served as deputy secretary of Health and Human Services under George. W Bush and is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, argued that being in touch with the culture is now important for any presidential contender.
“It is clearly helpful if not mandatory to be in touch with the popular culture when running for any office, but especially the presidency,” he said. “I would not say that [Mitt] Romney was culturally illiterate, but he was out of touch. When he made cultural references, they tended to be to ‘Seinfeld’ or to ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,’ which were funny, but also two decades old. He definitely could have done better on the culture front, but one of the lessons of my book is that pop cultural literacy is very hard to fake.”
Troy says that one of the most interesting facts he discovered researching the book was that Jimmy Carter watched a staggering “480 films in one term in the White House.”
See below TheDC’s full interview with Troy about his book, the reading battles between George W. Bush and Karl Rove, and much more:
Why did you decide to write the book?
As a presidential historian by training and a former White House aide, I have long been interested in the subject of what influences presidents. I wrote my first book on intellectuals and the American presidency and found that while presidents could use intellectuals to their advantage, their influence on the presidency was somewhat limited. So I started looking at cultural influences. First I wrote something on books presidents read, and then I followed up with something on movies they watched. The topic interested me, so I decided to do a more comprehensive analysis.
Who was the most culturally in touch president we’ve ever had?
I give this award to Bill Clinton. He was groundbreaking in his use of music on his campaign – think of his saxophone playing on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” and the endless repetitions of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow).” He loved movies, and could discuss films with the best of them. He was a huge and wide ranging reader, who loved mysteries, policy books, and serious literature. But he also knew how to appeal to the common man, and didn’t get too high-minded or snobbish about things. I never thought I’d be praising Bill Clinton on The Daily Caller’s website, but looking at presidential uses of pop culture gave me a new and unexpected appreciation for Clinton.
Do you have to be in touch with the culture to be elected president today more so than in the past? Do you think that Romney’s seeming cultural illiteracy hurt his candidacy?
It is clearly helpful if not mandatory to be in touch with the popular culture when running for any office, but especially the presidency. I would not say that Romney was culturally illiterate, but he was out of touch. When he made cultural references, they tended to be to “Seinfeld” or to “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” which were funny, but also two decades old. He definitely could have done better on the culture front, but one of the lessons of my book is that pop cultural literacy is very hard to fake.
What effect has “Saturday Night Live” had in shaping how we view our presidents? They have, after all, been satirizing our commanders in chiefs since 1975.
SNL made it OK to mock the president on TV. Network censors prevented the imitation of presidents on TV in the 1960s, especially under Kennedy, but SNL had no such hesitations, and NBC gave them free reign. The biggest impact the show had on any one presidency was under Gerald Ford. Ford was the best athlete ever to become president, but thanks a couple of highly publicized stumbles, and Chevy Chase’s devastating portrayal of Ford, he became known to one and all as a klutz.
You write that Teddy Roosevelt used to read books at parties. Would he just show up and then go into a corner and read? Why would he do that?
From a very young age, Roosevelt had a deep hunger for books. If a visitor to the White House failed to attract his attention, he was indeed apt to pick up a book and start reading. But he used books to help his career, and would cultivate authors of books he liked to serve as informal advisers. When Roosevelt was vice president, President William McKinley once told him, “You make me envious. You’ve been able to get so much out of books.”
What is President Obama’s relationship with the cultural zeitgeist? Is it different than other presidents we’ve had?
Obama had the most pop culture suffused childhood of any president. He grew up with television, and loved popular music as well. As a politician, he has been able to use his pop culture knowledge and comfort to reach out to segmented portions of the American electorate in two successful campaigns. But I also wonder whether all this pop culture outreach comes with a cost, in the form of a diminished stature of the presidency.
What literary works shaped Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy?
It’s hard to say, since Jefferson read so much, but I tell one story in the book from Stephen Greenblatt’s “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.” Greenblatt argues that the discovery of Lucretius’ long-lost Epicurean poem De rerum natura (“On the Nature of Things”) in 1417 was the “swerve” that changed the direction of human history. Jefferson owned five copies of De rerum natura in Latin, as well as English, French, and Italian translations. Jefferson even responded to a question on his personal philosophy by stating, “I am an Epicurean.” I write in the book that, “there is scarcely a more impressive measure of an author’s influence on history than the boast that he shaped the thinking of Thomas Jefferson.”
What is the most interesting story or fact you discovered researching the book?
There are too many to list here, but the facts that Jimmy Carter saw 480 films in one term in the White House, and that Woodrow Wilson, our only Ph.D. president, saw 250 plays, many of them of the Vaudeville variety, really stuck with me.
You were in the Bush administration so perhaps you can clear this question up for me. Karl Rove has claimed that he and George W. Bush would have reading contests — reading each year as many as 100 books or more while Bush was still president. That can’t be true, right? How would President Bush have time to read a book every three days while he was leading the country?
I don’t think President Bush ever hit 100 books in a year while president, but he and Karl Rove were definitely in the high double digits. As with everything else, the choice of what and how much to read is about priorities, and Bush made the reading of serious non-fiction one of his priorities during his leisure hours. The little secret of the White House is that presidents are actually pretty free in the evenings if they don’t have a social event planned that night. While White House staffers like myself may have to stay late writing memos and such, the president has a large staff of people to do that sort of thing, which leaves him free to read if he so chooses.
As a conservative intellectual in the policy world, what three books shaped your worldview?
Tough question, as I am constantly reading books that I find both informative and influential. But my early twenties were my most formative period intellectually and politically, and some of the books I read then that have stuck with me include:
1.) “Common Ground” — J. Anthony Lukas’ look at the unintended consequences of liberal paternalism on a specific community, namely Boston residents affected by racially-directed school busing.
2.) “The Closing of the American Mind” — Allan Bloom taught me to look at and understand the impact of culture on American youth in a wholly new way.
3.) “The Road to Serfdom” — Hayek explained the folly of socialism, and why it could not work, in crisp, clear, and usable language.
Also, he was not so much a book writer as an essayist, but ever since I discovered the writings of Irving Kristol when I was a 20-year old studying in London, I have never looked at culture or politics in the same way.
