Wealth & Money Quote by Morley Safer

"Off-the-wall" is a deceptively casual phrase for a journalist of Morley Safer's era: plainspoken on the surface, prosecutorial underneath. Safer isn't calling the Marc Rich pardon merely controversial or politically costly; he's suggesting it violates the basic geometry of how power is supposed to behave. The idiom does two things at once. It makes the decision sound impulsive, even unserious, while implying it’s so far outside accepted norms that normal explanations (mercy, rehabilitation, due process) don’t apply.

The specific intent is to puncture any attempt to frame Clinton's last-minute clemency as a complicated moral judgment. Safer reaches for the language of the everyday viewer because the scandal itself was legible in everyday terms: a wealthy fugitive financier, a pardon issued in the administration's closing hours, and a cloud of access and donations surrounding Clinton's circle. "Off-the-wall" carries the subtext of "You don't need a law degree to smell this."

Context matters. Safer, long associated with the cool authority of broadcast news, is policing credibility as much as policy. In the late-1990s and early-2000s media ecosystem, the Clinton presidency had already trained the public to expect a running battle over norms, motives, and truth. By choosing a phrase that sounds almost blunt to the point of impatience, Safer stakes out a position: whatever the legal discretion of a pardon, the cultural contract has been breached. The line works because it treats the pardon not as a gray-area debate but as a shared reality-test the audience is expected to pass.