Bill Clinton’s past comes back to haunt him
“The Bill Clinton moment has finally arrived,” said Ruth Graham on Slate. After weeks of scandal about powerful men exploiting women, the spotlight has landed on the former president. Two decades ago, America’s first national conversation about Clinton’s treatment of women “ended in a muddled draw”. Clinton confessed to two affairs, with Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky. He was also accused of three cases of nonconsensual sexual contact: Paula Jones said he exposed himself to her in a hotel room; Kathleen Willey said he groped her in the Oval Office; and Juanita Broaddrick said he raped her in a hotel room in the late 1970s. At the time, Democrats were quick to defend Clinton from what they regarded as a partisan witch-hunt. But in the wake of the scandal triggered by the Harvey Weinstein exposé, liberals are now reassessing Clinton’s “moral legacy”.
What convenient timing, said Kevin D. Williamson in National Review. “Our progressive friends have discovered their consciences on the Clinton matter at the precise moment the Clintons ceased to be useful instruments of political power.” Actually, this timing is “decidedly inconvenient”, said Josh Barro on Businessinsider.com. It would have been better for the Democrats if Clinton had quit in 1998, ceding power to Vice-president Al Gore. Gore would have pursued the same agenda as Clinton and would have fought the 2000 election – the race he narrowly lost – with the advantages of incumbency. Better still, it would have ended the Clinton dynasty, meaning someone other than Hillary would have been the nominee in 2016. Sticking by Bill, in short, cost the Democrats two presidential elections, which in moral terms is probably just “what they deserved”.
Leave Bill alone, said Jamie Stiehm on Usnews.com. It’s not as if he got a free pass in the 1990s. The independent counsel, Ken Starr, thoroughly investigated Willey and Broaddrick’s claims and found them not credible enough to be used in the case against Clinton. As for the ill-judged affair with Lewinsky, Clinton was “flogged in the public square, over and over” for it. He was also impeached by the House, before being acquitted by the Senate. Was all this not punishment enough? “Let’s not build a modern Salem all over again, relitigating the most painful chapter of the Clinton presidency. It’s done and gone.”