Countdown Crazy

And a wild 2000 election night with Harvey and Hillary

It’s here at last. The restless terror of election day, when there’s nothing but dead air filled by pundits blathering and text threads from hair-on-fire friends sending anecdotal nuggets of hope. As the votes tally, I shall be watching at home with my two kids, a snoring bulldog, and a handy vial of Klonopin in case everything goes south.

Party Crashers

My decision to bail on media invites and somber watch gatherings is informed by superstition as much as by preference.

I have been leery of election watch parties ever since Hillary lost. That dread evening I was at a flashy Snapchat event in the old NYT building with wall-to-wall social media screens until the sudden realization of what was happening to Hillary’s “certain success” scattered the crowd like the rumor of an active shooter.

Even more unforgettable was the Bush v. Gore 2000 election night blow-out at Elaine’s restaurant, that now deceased hangout of artists and writers on the Upper East Side. It was the ultimate expression of legacy media’s dinosaur days, co-hosted by me as editor of Talk magazine; Michael Bloomberg in his pre-mayoral man-about-town era; and Harvey Weinstein, then still king of the Oscars and not yet identified as the Me Too minotaur who now sits in orange pajamas awaiting his second New York trial on Rikers Island.

It was, I recall, our publisher Ron Galotti’s wheeze to wow Talk advertisers with a buzzfest that leveraged Harvey’s Miramax celebrity pull. Uma Thurman, J.Lo, Ethan Hawke, Ben Affleck, Sigourney Weaver, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Chevy Chase all swung by in a pileup of idling limos and jabbered at the bar.

But Harvey had only one thing on his wish list that night: obeisance from Hillary. He had hosted multiple star-stuffed fundraisers for her ultimately successful Senate run that year, and wanted some public kissy-face to confirm his power in politics as well as entertainment. He had strong-armed her into a promise to make a victorious flyby at Elaine’s after the election result was called. The paparazzi and the NYPD had been notified, and barriers had been erected all down Second Avenue. The Secret Service and their sniffer dogs (going straight for the hors d'oeuvres) had cased the restaurant an hour before the party.

But by 10 pm things were going funky for Gore, and Hillary had not appeared at Elaine’s. Guests were thinning out. Harvey kept marauding out onto Second Avenue and shouting into his flip phone as he paced the sidewalk. Receiving his wrath was Miramax communications chief Matt Hiltzik, who was helping Hillary’s campaign that night and was by her side at her own post-victory gathering with Bill in a penthouse at the Grand Hyatt hotel.

“Town cars! Six town cars!” Harvey yelled. If Hillary wasn’t coming to Elaine’s, then Elaine’s would come to Hillary. Miramax flunkies started to arbitrarily pull 30 or so startled attendees out the door and cram them into the arriving fleet. They included most of the gossip columnists the Clintons would probably go a long way to avoid. Once at the Grand Hyatt, we all streamed after Harvey through a side entrance into a huge rattling service elevator that took us up to the 34^th floor. The doors opened directly onto the president’s armed Secret Service detail, who, incredibly, just waved us all right into the suite where a genial Bill Clinton was standing by the door dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, glass in hand, like a caught-in-motion waxwork figure at Madame Tussauds. (Hillary, sparkling with success, was off in the bedroom receiving homage for her Senate win from a cluster of top donors and the opera star Jessye Norman.) Bill surveyed our motley delegation with the expert calculation of exactly how many seconds he needed to apportion each one of these randos who'd crashed his suite with one of his top donors.

There we all circulated until 2:30 am, with the president jabbing the TV set as the networks made and then withdrew their Florida calls for Gore, then Bush. His granular political knowledge was so detailed it was astounding. He was the presidential version of Steve Kornacki at the magic wall, keeping up a running commentary to the room about which states third-party spoiler Ralph Nader was directly responsible for the vice president losing.

Harvey maneuvered his enormous bulk into Hillary’s boudoir with the inner circle, like a satisfied pufferfish. He had made his point. He had shown the gossip press that his was the ultimate all-access pass, and the Clintons that he would not be blown off or spurned.  

“Harvey always had a plan B,” Hiltzik reflected when I asked him to remember that evening. Not anymore.

This Blows

In a prescient 2011 essay in The Daily Beast, Bret Easton Ellis argued that the old world order of “Empire,” when power and prestige and PR ruled the airwaves, was ebbing. Multiple factors, economic and political, meant “the mask of pride was eradicated,” Ellis explained in an interview. Unfettered and unleashed, the post-Empire ethos swept away “that empirical attitude of believing you’re better than everyone” and allowed “the admission of doing illicit things publicly.”

Ellis was so right. The sight of the possible next president of the United States emulating fellatio on stage when his mic went down during a Milwaukee rally on Friday night is perhaps the ultimate post-Empire moment, surpassing even Trump’s mooning over the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis.

I suddenly imagined the late, silver-haired, mono-bosomed conservative matriarch Barbara Bush watching that bit. And what about those seemingly square Bible Belt evangelicals? I marvel at how few of 2024’s GOP voters seem particularly appalled by the pornification of their political party. Trump is an insult comic; that's his social place. But returning him to the Oval Office? 

Over the last eight years, Trump has liberated the ugliest expression of America's id, that violent, misogynist, world-conquering male force that drove this country's progress even as our Christian ethos tried to wall in its excesses. If he wins, the liberals’ progressive terror, with its scolding and canceling, has played its own deadly part in letting that id rip. The crashing sound of corporate DEI departments being dismantled is already a harbinger of how severe the backlash will be.      

Writing of TV actor Charlie Sheen’s disinhibited antics in 2011, Ellis could just as easily have been writing about politics today as entertainment then. “Do they really want manners? Civility? Empire courtesy?” he asked of the American TV-watching public. “No. They want reality, no matter how crazy the celeb who brings it on has become. Charlie Sheen doesn’t care what you think of him anymore, and he scoffs at the idea that anyone even thinks there’s such a thing as PR taboo. ‘Hey suits, I don’t give a shit, you suck,’ is what so many of the disenfranchised have responded to.” As Ellis might now say of Trump, Sheen was “new reality, bitch, and anyone who’s a hater can go back and hang out with the rest of the trolls in the Empire’s dank graveyard.”

  But will that “new reality” collide with a force it didn’t see coming?  The early surge to the polls in swing states of women who favor Harris may indicate the other half of the human race has had enough of a foaming, foul-mouthed madman who has pledged to take care of them “whether they like it or not.”  

 The scripted, anointed Kamala is Empire incarnate but tant pis. Soon we’ll know if decency and the desire to preserve democracy still count for something in America, and if—perhaps for the last time—Empire will strike back.