Franken forcing Dems to scrutinize themselves
Scandal rocks party that stakes its reputation on women’s rights
McClatchy DC
WASHINGTON — Democrats called Sen. Al Franken’s behavior unacceptable, returned his campaign donations, and hinted that — absent a satisfying explanation in response to a sexual harassment allegation — they’d eventually demand he resign.
Anything less would risk catastrophe for a party that stakes its political reputation on fighting for women. Especially one that is just now, 20 years after the fact, grappling withits unyielding support of former President Bill Clinton.
“Sexual harassment is never acceptable and must not be tolerated,” said Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “I hope and expect that the Ethics Committee will fully investigate this troubling incident, as they should with any credible allegation of sexual harassment.”
Talk show host Leeann Tweeden on Thursday accused Mr. Franken of sexually assaulting her during an overseas USO tour in 2006, three years before he became a Democratic senator from Minnesota. She said Mr. Franken forcibly kissed her, and later posed for a photo in which he groped her chest while she slept.
The Minnesota Democrat issued a statement apologizing to Ms. Tweeden and said he would welcome a congressional ethics investigation into the incident. But the allegations had by that time already sent shockwaves through the Democratic Party.
Democrats, who rely heavily on women for votes, regularly criticize Republicans for being insufficiently supportive of women on issues like abortion rights and gender pay equity.
Their attacks have been especially sharp recently, dwelling on the litany of sexual assault allegations against President Donald Trump and, more recently, the accusations that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore once sexually assaultedchildren.
Now, the party has been forced to scrutinize its own ranks.
Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to former President Barack Obama, tweeted the picture of Mr. Franken groping Ms. Tweeden and asked if people would find it funny if he were doing that to a loved one. Guy Cecil, a veteran Democratic operative, tweeted that “Franken must be held accountable if our party wants to live up to our commitment to women & girls.”
And Mr. Franken’s colleague, Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, said “an apology does not excuse his behavior.”
Many Democrats also returned money that Mr. Franken or his political action committee had contributed to the campaign: Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, for instance, donated $30,000 of Mr. Franken’s contributions to charity.
The deluge of criticism for Mr. Franken comes amid a broader cultural moment in the country, in which multitudes of women have stepped forward to accuse famous men of sexual assault and harassment, most prominently in the cases of major Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein and comedian Louis C.K.
That movement also has caused some Democrats to rethink past support of Mr. Clinton. Accusations of sexual assault against the former president are not new but, to some, are now seen in a new light.
“But now that Hillary is out of electoral politics and has emerged as a bigger draw and more potent political force than her husband, there’s no excuse for Democrats not to look back on these events with more objectivity,” wrote the liberal writer Matthew Yglesias, in a column titled Bill Clinton should have resigned. “Fiftysomething leaders of organizations shouldn’t be carrying on affairs with interns who work for them regardless of whether the affair is in some senseconsensual.”
This is not the same approach Democrats took decades ago when Mr. Clinton was facing allegations of sexual assault and harassment, a point Mr. Trump and Republicans often made during the 2016 election when Ms. Clinton attempted to draw attention to the allegations against Mr. Trump.
More than two decades ago, Democrats did not believe the accusers. James Carville, Mr. Clinton’s thenstrategist, once infamously said: “If you drag a hundreddollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.”
Mr. Yglesias, a liberal blogger who once worked at the Center for American Progress, a pillar of the Clinton political world, wrote on Vox.com on Wednesday that “I think we got it wrong” by defending Mr. Clinton in the 1990s and that he should have resigned. Chris Hayes, the liberal MSNBC host, said on Twitter that “Democrats and the center left are overdue for a real reckoning with the allegations against him.”
Caitlin Flanagan, a social critic who calls herself a “lifelong Democrat, an enemy of machine feminism and a sexual assault survivor,” wrote on The Atlantic’s website that “the Democratic Party needs to make its own reckoning of the way it protected Bill Clinton.” David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official, said Monica S. Lewinsky “deserves an apology from many of us she has never received.”
“It’s about time,” Kathleen Willey, another woman who accused Mr. Clinton of sexual harassment, said Wednesday in a phone interview from her home in Richmond, Va. “We’ve waited for years for vindication.”
She expressed bitterness that liberals and feminists did not believe her or the other accusers at the time. “They’re hypocrites,” she said. “They worship at the altar of all things Clinton. They’re all over Roy Moore, but they had nothing to say about Bill Clinton when he was accused of doing what he wasaccused of doing.”