The Final Days

The Final Days is a humorous short film produced by the White House to screen at the White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner in April 2000. It stars then-President of the United States Bill Clinton as himself. The film was designed by officials of the outgoing Clinton administration to neutralize media portrayals of Bill Clinton as a "lame duck" president by exaggerating that narrative to the point of absurdity. Plot The Final Days is a comedic look at Clinton's last days in the White House as he approached lame duck status. In it, he is shown "roaming the halls of an empty White House like a lost 222-pound [100 kg] puppy in search of a purpose". Production Development The idea for the film came from Clinton's joke writer Mark Katz who had observed that a dominant media narrative in the late days of the 2000 election was that the incumbent president, whose wife was campaigning for U.S. Senate while national attention was focused on the presidential contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush, was "increasingly being depicted as the lonely guy minding the store". The film was intended to subvert that narrative by establishing ownership of it. In a 2007 analysis of rhetorical humor in American political communication, Michael Andrew Phillips-Anderson argued that the film satirized, not Clinton, but rather the media who had suggested the president had advanced to lame duck status. By showing Clinton involved in mundane tasks that would be extraordinary for a U.S. president to undertake, such as answering the White House switchboard and practicing origami, the film served to erode such assertions by highlighting their absurdity.