Episode 11, with guest Dee Dee Myers, Former White House Press Secretary

Dee Dee Myers is our interview guest this week
Show produced by Katherine Caperton
Original Air Date: May 21, 2011 on SiriusXM Satellite Radio “POTUS” Channel 124.  Click above to listen

Dee Dee Myers was the first female White House Press Secretary and remains one of Washington’s most recognizable faces.  She joins us for a 40+ minute interview on Polioptics this week against a backdrop of the unique role that woman may, or may not, play in the 2012 races.  As Dee Dee joined us in our studio, she had just published a provocative piece in Politico, “Women 2012: Campaign Sideshows,” in which she wrote, “in the absence of a serious figure, like (Hillary) Clinton, the women getting attention as the campaign season begins fall into two categories: provocative but unelectable and provocative but who may render their husbands unelectable.”

We use that as a jumping off point to talk about all things Polioptic, from the stagecraft of the current White House to the one in which Myers served for President Bill Clinton.  We return in our conversation to events perhaps somewhat forgotten, but certainly momentous.  The conversation ranges from the serious, like the U.S. raid on the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas, to sublime, like the 1992 appearance of then-Governor Clinton on the Arsenio Hall Show and the silly, the brouhaha over the famous presidential haircut on Air Force One.

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(And that’s just Clinton’s gig playing the Sax.  For an interesting trip back in time, have a view of Arsenio’s actual 1992 interview of the Arkansas Governor, which is posted in three parts: part 1part 2 and part 3, which features a fascinating appearance by the former First Lady of Arkansas, Hillary Rodham Clinton.)

In her years since leaving the White House, in addition to her roles as a contributing editor of Vanity Fair and a consultant to NBC’s THE WEST WING, Dee Dee has become an icon for women in the working world.  In 2008, she published Why Women Should Rule The World and earlier this year was named aJones New York Empowerment Ambassador, along with a handful of equally accomplished women from other walks of life.  At the JNY site, she writes a monthly Empowerment Journal and offers the introduction to an interactive book of career wit, wisdom and advice for women.

Most striking about Dee Dee’s role as an Empowerment Ambassador is her turn in the “Power Women of D.C.” advertising campaign in which she poses in the back of a limousine in front of the lens of famous fashion photographer Norman Jean Roy.  If the campaign hasn’t been commanding full bleed double-trucks in Vogue, Cosmopolitan and Glamour, it at least has been gracing scores of bus shelters in and around Washington, D.C.!

Dee Dee looks fabulous — better, certainly, than some of her tougher days behind the podium as President Clinton’s first Press Secretary, and a whole lot better than the last power broker to be captured in a similar setting: the late Mike Deaver,image maestro for Ronald Reagan and, in many ways, the father of Polioptics.  That limo shot, and the cover of Time Magazine that it resulted in, was not one of Deaver’s better moments.

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