The American President with Lindsay Chervinsky

This has been a huge week here at HATM. We had the emergency podcast about Napoleon drop late Sunday night and approximately 67 billion of you gobbled it up (numbers slightly exaggerated for effect). We also hit our 25,000th download and we have an episode that is just shy of hitting 1,000 downloads on its own.

That said, you still get your weekly episode, and this was originally supposed to kick off Year Two (just another thing to blame Napoleon for). But nevertheless, I wanted to judge what kind of interest there is in multiple episodes in a week, plus see what kind of attention the pod gets on a Thursday instead of a Wednesday. So I hope you don’t mind that at all.

This week’s guest is Lindsay Chervinsky, who returns for her favorite film, The American President. And here’s some inside baseball for you: when I first started imagining what this podcast would, Lindsay was the first person I asked to be on the podcast. This was a couple years ago and she eagerly accepted and asked to do The American President. And it’s a good thing she claimed it because several other guests have asked to do this film.

There’s probably a good reason for that. The American President released in 1995, during the honeymoon of the Clinton Administration and before the President’s extramarital affairs got the best of him. This movie was penned by Aaron Sorkin and in many ways is the precursor for arguably his best work, The West Wing, which dropped a couple years later featuring the same set and much of the same cast. I think the two of these offer a really interesting look at how we saw the presidency in the mid-90s and I wonder how this film looks in a post-Trump world.

Or I suppose we could just ask Lindsay, which I do, alongside a host of other questions about presidential sex, the role of the Cabinet, and even presidential pets. This was, as always, an awesome conversation and I learned a ton. I hope you like it.

You can find the episode on Apple Podcasts here:

And on Spotify here:

And if you’re looking for books on the presidency, Lindsay has you covered. Check them out here:

The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution https://a.co/d/bw1wK3X

Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture (Miller Center Studies on the Presidency) https://a.co/d/eN17Dxw

Hey everyone, thanks for reading this and being part of this community. I’m at Disney World at the moment but will have thoughts for you soon. Y’all are amazing.

-JWH