Mark Halperin

And then the other thing is, it just became

such that we didn't put our political figures on pedestals the way we did for a variety of reasons, not just because the end of the Cold War.

And also, there was just enough new media that standards got lowered.

The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the networks didn't have the monopoly they did.

And so questions were getting asked, rude questions would get asked by people who worked for Howard Stern or people who wrote for supermarket tabloids.

so a lot of this stuff as i said started in 1992 in the clinton campaign and part of what drove it was bill clinton uh was a man who'd lived a rich and colorful life okay and uh he got a lot of scrutiny for that uh about his finances his wife's finances about his personal life and uh the clinton's thought uh well under the old rules of of things uh

Plenty of presidents had affairs.

President Kennedy, for instance, never got asked about it.

And so the old rules would hold.

And Clinton's tried to diffuse a little bit of the prospect that maybe the old rules wouldn't hold.

They said,

to a room full of reporters before he got officially in the race.

The Clintons were there together.

He said something like, I caused pain in my marriage, but we're still together.

But that didn't hold.

And he got tons of scrutiny for Jennifer Flowers and a whole bunch of other women.

And from the Clintons' point of view, they were furious because they said, why are we getting all this scrutiny?

Where's the scrutiny on the other people?

And one of the people they wondered about was President Bush, who was going to be the Republican nominee.

They'd want to know where's the scrutiny on him.