#344 The Last Forty Years of American Politics w/ Joe Lockhart
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 25 August 2025
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Joe Lockhart served as White House Press Secretary for President Bill Clinton from 1998-2000, and played central roles in Presidential campaigns from Walter Mondale to John Kerry. In this episode, Joe joins us to recap how the political landscape has changed since the 1980s and the paths that Democrats might pursue in their efforts to escape the political wilderness.
This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Ben Sawyer and this is the road to now. |
| 0:08.4 | Our guest today is Joe Lockhart. |
| 0:10.6 | Joe was the press secretary for Bill Clinton. |
| 0:13.6 | I took over right during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. |
| 0:17.1 | So hard first days at work. |
| 0:19.6 | But his career has spanned decades. He was working for the |
| 0:23.3 | Mondale campaign in 84, worked for John Kerry, and has since then done all kinds of amazing things. |
| 0:28.7 | You can check out the link in the bio. Too many to mention, or at least some that if we mentioned, |
| 0:32.4 | you're going to be like, why didn't we ask him about that? Well, we barely got into it. |
| 0:36.9 | We're going to have to have Joe back on |
| 0:38.2 | because this conversation was great. We just wanted to recap where we are with politics, |
| 0:43.3 | how, again, we thought we got here, what's happening currently. Those are all things that are |
| 0:50.0 | hard to see. And with somebody like Joe's instincts and experience, it's pretty interesting to |
| 0:55.1 | hear his take on that, as well as his stories about working for Clinton, which were fantastic. |
| 1:01.4 | Shout out again to Doug Hi. I mean, it's like a man's name is on the show every week. But |
| 1:05.1 | apparently, Doug brought Joe to the live show in D.C. And Joe saw us there, and we all got to be friends. |
| 1:12.8 | So pretty cool story that led to a pretty cool conclusion. |
| 1:15.9 | Speaking of which, it's the conclusion of my year off from teaching. |
| 1:19.7 | I'm going back to teaching the morning this airs as you listen to this. |
| 1:22.5 | If you listen to it on Monday, August 25th, I'm back in the classroom. |
| 1:29.1 | I had to miss last year because of stupid cancer. I'm fine now, except for the fact that I miss teaching. And man, MTSU, what is up? |
| 1:35.2 | I am going to be so happy to be back in my classes tomorrow. Ah, I love history. Thank you guys |
... |
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