If you’re a certain Democratic presidential frontrunner and desperate for good press, look no further than Hollywood to meet those needs.
Hillary Clinton sat down for an interview (and took some “we”fies) with “hardline journalist” Lena Dunham (Girls) recently and the gushing that ensued would make even the biggest fangirl blush.
Turns out Clinton isn’t afraid of the press, so much as she is afraid of bad press. Good thing there’s at least one radical feminist in Hollywood who’s guaranteed to avoid any questions that might make her subject look bad (you know, like about email servers, Benghazi, etc).
The interview was released by Dunham’s newsletter, “Lenny,” this morning, accompanied by hard-hitting stories titled, “My Queer Wedding,” “Is My Period Weird” and “Tracing a Trend: Denim Explosion.”
Let’s look at some of the highlights of this interview with a former senator, former Secretary of State and current presidential candidate:
DUNHAM: We’re all very curious at Lenny about what your passions outside of the political arena are. And we brought with us some very Instagram-worthy photographs of you during that time in your life.
[Old photographs of Clinton in her college days]
CLINTON: Oh my gosh! Look at that!
DUNHAM: Here, if you want to look at them, they might bring up some memories.
CLINTON: I will! Oh, they do. Well, this is me at one of my favorite places in college, which was the lake that we had on campus. I just adored it.
Is that where she hid, er, misplaced the Rose Law Firm billing records?
After taking a trip “down memory lane” that, oddly, didn’t include stops at Cattle Futures, Travelgate, Whitewater or Interns-R-Us, Dunham asked her about her campus activism, odd jobs in her ‘20’s, thoughts on feminism, and what it was like marrying Bill. On that subject, Dunham sat silent as one half of the world’s most calculated and mercenary married couple claimed, “At every step along the way, I never could have predicted what I would have ended up doing.”
Dunham invited Hillary to talk about her student loan pander:
“And I want to put a time-certain deadline — that after 20 years, you don’t have to keep paying [student loan debt]. Now, if you don’t pay, and there’s no good reason why you couldn’t or didn’t pay, it’ll go longer.”
A journalist might have asked the woman with her own bathroom closet email server about monitoring and enforcement of the plan, but Dunham was anxious to make sure Hillary checked the identity politics boxes, like feminism (she’s for it!) and Black Lives Matter.
Dunham teed the latter up for Hillary by saying:
“So many young women of color — so many people of color — have suffered at the hands of police in the last few years. And I wonder, as president, what you will do to work on this kind of terrible fracture in race relations that we’re experiencing in America right now [?]”
(We’ll spare you Hillary’s response, which was social justice boilerplate tempered with nods to reality.)
Interspersed throughout the interview were lots of exclamations and affirmations from Dunham, like,
“[Laughs delightedly.] No way!”
“Wow.”
“Of course!”
“Hallelujah!”
Dunham seemed to hang on every word that came from Hillary’s mouth with anticipation as if she were listening to the next Messiah. (Some liberals never get tired of saviors.)
The interview ended with perhaps the most insipid question of all: “We need to ask you about this dress.” What is this, the Fashion Police?
Dunham circled around Clinton with vapid compliments to end the interview, insisting that she was “a fashion icon” and her dress was “extremely chic.” Which is hilarious because if there’s one thing for which Clinton has never been feted, it’s her fashion sense. Even Clinton seemed embarassed, admitting that she’s “hardly a fashion icon." But don’t tell that to Lena Dunham – whose own wardrobe is far worse.
Given who we can assume is the audience for Dunham’s newsletter, they may have learned something about Hillary on the way to finding out if their "periods are weird." The rest of us just learned that the feminist concept of “toxic masculinity” has a female counterpart.
