Back to 1998

Over the years I’ve periodically been reminded of the many ways in which Bill Clinton’s presidency debased our civic culture. Recently the reminders have been especially pointed.

First we had the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani on NBC, explaining to Chuck Todd that “truth isn’t truth”—an invitation, perhaps, to parse the meaning of the word “isn’t” just as Clinton once parsed the meaning of the word “is.”

Next came the publication of a scathing 1998 memo from Brett Kavanaugh, written when the Supreme Court nominee was a young lawyer working for the independent counsel Ken Starr.

“The president has disgraced his Office, the legal system, and the American people by having sex with a 22-year-old intern and turning her life into a shambles,” Kavanaugh wrote, calling it “callous and disgusting behavior that has somehow gotten lost in the shuffle.”

Then there was Michael Cohen’s guilty plea for criminal violations of campaign-finance laws. This was soon followed by the usual casuistry from Donald Trump and his defenders explaining why the offense, as it related to the president, was legally trivial, or that the economy would collapse in the event of impeachment, or that Trump’s critics were mentally deranged, or that the president was entitled to the sort of deference due to kings.

And as ever, the president continued to lie to the American people, while acting as if the outrage he elicits is merely evidence of how unfairly he’s treated.

It was all vintage Bill: deploying minions to lie about illicit sex (and twist the meaning of words), abusing the powers of the presidency to trash the reputations of others, converting his character flaws into a national convulsion. Clinton did all this, and so has Trump. What the former pioneered, the latter has simply taken to the next level.

Thanks to the #MeToo movement, there’s been a long-delayed reconsideration among liberals about their past defense of (or relative indifference to) Clinton’s sexual predations. Monica Lewinsky and Juanita Broaddrick, once targets of left-wing snickering and contempt, have at last received a measure of respect as victims and survivors.

But the reconsideration isn’t complete. Last week I noted that Republicans who demanded Clinton’s impeachment 20 years ago—because he had corrupted the moral fiber of the country and the legal fabric of the state—are hypocritical in refusing to apply the same logic to Trump.

By the same token, liberals now calling for Trump’s impeachment ought to rethink the excuses so many of them made for Clinton 20 years ago. That it was “just sex.” Or that “lying about sex” doesn’t rise to the level of an impeachable offense (even if it’s lying about sex under oath). Or that “character doesn’t matter” so long as the administration produces peace and prosperity. Or that the motivating animus of the president’s critics is reason enough to dismiss the criticism.

These excuses were toxic not because they had no merit but because they sidestepped the core of the issue: The survival and ennoblement of democracy depend on holding people in high office to higher, not lower, standards.

Clinton’s supposedly “small” lie about sex (like Trump’s “small” violation of campaign finance laws) was not so small coming from the one person uniquely entrusted to uphold and enforce the law. It sent a signal that lying would be politically acceptable and legally tolerated. Clinton’s lawyerly prevarications helped create the truth-optional standard by which the Trump presidency operates.

The claim by Clinton’s defenders that his job performance immunized him from impeachment sowed the seed for Trump’s remark, in an interview with Fox News last week, that “I don’t know how you can impeach somebody who has done a great job.”

Then, too, the Clinton machine’s relentless efforts to delegitimize the independent counsel by claiming Starr had gone far beyond his original remit to investigate the Whitewater case mirror the Trump machine’s attacks on Robert Mueller today.

Yet what Starr did then is what Mueller and other prosecutors are doing now: uncovering wrongdoing where they find it. That Trump’s hush money to two women has nothing to do with Russia makes the wrongdoing no less contemptible, illegal—and, because it’s about the president, impeachable.

Because the Clinton impeachment saga is still relatively recent, it’s been depressing—and instructive—to watch the two sides in that drama conveniently adopt the other’s former rationale for their own partisan convenience. (Lindsey Graham, this means you.)

But anyone who now calls for Trump to be judged severely should acknowledge that we would have been in a better place today if Clinton hadn’t been so fervently defended back then. Among other things, it might have dissuaded other sexual predators and congenital liars from running for high office.

We can still get it right. Some intellectual consistency would go a long way.