Hillary Clinton and Lena Dunham on College Debt, Salmon, and Lenny Kravitz’s Wardrobe Malfunction
Image by Youtube
By John A. Oswald September 29, 2015
It’s hard to get past this nugget out of Hillary Clinton’s much ballyhooed interview with “Girls” creator Lena Dunham: The woman who wants to be President of the United States asks where she can find the video of Lenny Kravitz’s junk falling out of his split pants.
“Did you see the footage where his, like, pants split?” Dunham asks the former secretary of state of the moment, caught on video, that Kravitz’s manhood made its debut for all the world to see. “I mean, his stuff, like fell out of his pants.”
“No, I missed that,” Clinton responded in a promo video for the sitdown. “Do you think I could get that on YouTube? Yeah, I’ll look for that.
Sure, it was meant to be a joke — and Clinton did talk about her early life (including her support for Barry Goldwater) and some major issues, like student debt. But really, imagine if a male interviewer asked Jeb Bush or Bernie Sanders if they caught the recent revealing photos of model Cara Delevingne’s bending over and showing a little too much.
Then imagine Bush or Sanders saying they plan to scour the Net so he can take a gander. There’d be pandemonium.
Interestingly, the Kravitz bit (which may have been just a scripted haha) is not in Dunham’s Q&A text that went out Tuesday morning.
The full softball interview (Dunham is a huge Clinton fan) is available only via an emailed newsletter that you can only get by signing up at , the new feminist website launched over the summer by Dunham and her “Girls” co-executive producer Jenni Konner.
Here’s a look at some more of what Clinton, 67, had to say to the 29-year-old Millennial queen:
HILLARY ONCE LEANED REPUBLICAN
“I had some teachers, one in particular, who were very adamant about being conservative. So I worked for Barry Goldwater when he ran for president. I was a Goldwater girl, which meant I got to wear a cowboy hat, which I thought was really cool.
“Then I got to Wellesley, and I began to meet many different kinds of people, and we continued to talk about what we cared about and what we thought the country should be like and the world should be like. I found myself really evolving, moving toward a different set of beliefs.”
HILLARY SWAM ILLEGALLY
“Holding up a photo, she says: “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. I would swim illegally every chance I got. It was just a real center for my experience in college.”
ON YOUTHFUL INDECISION
“I don’t trust anybody who says that they didn’t have some questions in their 20s. That’s a period of such exploration and often torment in people’s lives. And so, when I graduated from college, I had made the decision I was going to go to law school …
But first, I went off with some friends on this jaunt. We drove all the way up to Alaska (and) took odd jobs. I washed dishes. I did end up working in a fishery …My first job was to gut the salmon.”
—
The former first lady went on to discuss some more issues of particular interest to Lenny’s young target audience, saying she wants to give college grads a chance to refinance their loans and get lower interest rates.
She also talked about the dismal state of relations between cops and communities of color and the death of black motorist Sandra Bland in a Texas jail cell.
“The police have to be held to a higher standard,” Clinton told Dunham. “They are the representatives of our society. Also, a lot of the community policing, community dialogue that we started to have some years ago has sort of petered out. It doesn’t happen like it used to. It needs to be constant.”
The interview ended with the two talking about Clinton’s so-called cold-shoulder black inaugural dress in 1993, when her husband, Bill Clinton, was sworn in as commander-in-chief.
“It was a design of my friend Donna Karan. And like everything I do, it turned out to be controversial. I’m hardly a fashion icon,” Hillary Clinton laughed.
“But I do love to fool around with fashion and have some fun with it. And so I wore this, and a lot of the political pundits [said]: “What is the meaning of this?” and everything.”
“It’s in the Clinton library, if anybody ever wants to see it.”
Some critics have described the sitdown as a misstep for Clinton, whose efforts to soften her image have even included doing the Nae Nae on The Ellen Show.
The Daily Beast has called the Dunham-Clinton pairing a “Millennial pandering” from a “white woman alliance.”
Mediaite critic Joe Concha pulled no punches writing Clinton made a misstep in turning “to the deplorable – and there really is no more appropriate word that applies here – Lena Dunham, the owner of one of HBO’s least-watched original programs ever, ‘Girls.’”
Ouch.
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