Moving on from Clinton-Lewinsky raises doubts now
Nearly 20 years ago, Berkeley resident Joan Blades cofounded what would become the progressive behemoth MoveOn.org. She and her husband, Wes Boyd, who made a fortune in software, were frustrated that Washington politics were gridlocked because of the fallout from President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. So six months after the scandal broke, they circulated a one-line petition online. It asked Congress to “censure President Clinton and move on.” It went viral and helped to shape the national debate. The House impeached Clinton, but the Senate did not convict him and he remained in office. The country moved on, albeit in even tighter partisan gridlock.
Looking back, though, was moving on really the best move?
As the list of men accused of sexual misconduct continues to grow — Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, newscaster Charlie Rose, Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota, Rep. John Conyers of Michigan are the latest — and given what we’re learning about powerful men harassing women, should we have treated the Clinton matter as more than a political battle? Should we have spent less time parsing the definition of the word “is” and more on the power dynamic between a middle-aged man and a female half his age?
A growing number of pro-
gressives now say that if Clinton had resigned, it would have sent a message that that kind of behavior wouldn’t be tolerated anymore.
But he didn’t. And the behavior continues to be tolerated at the highest level. On Tuesday President Trump, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by 16 women, defended Moore, who is accused of sexual misconduct by eight women.
“He really denies it,” Trump said by way of excusing Moore’s alleged behavior. Both men have called their accusers liars.
For Trump, politics was more important than anything those eight women have said about Moore: “We don’t need a liberal person in there, a Democrat, (Moore’s challenger Doug) Jones,” the president said.
Two things to know about Blades. She is no longer a part of MoveOn. Second, despite founding one of the most partisan organizations on the planet, she is a trained mediator — a soft-spoken, introspective person who searches for the middle ground.
And her current, nuanced “trans-partisan” point of view might point to a way for all of us — no matter our political perspective — to stop reflexively defending alleged abusers from our own political side and find common ground on how to change the pervasive culture of harassment.
But first, a quick look back at Bill Clinton.
“He should not have done it in the first place, that’s my starting place,” Blades told me in a Berkeley cafe this week. “I was angry. But the political reality (at the time) was that he was not going to be (forced) out of office, so let’s get back to business.
“That’s why he needed to be censured,” Blades said. “I wrote that (petition) so my conservative cousins might sign it. We had people who loved Clinton and hated Clinton — and all in between. And I was in between.
“Now in terms of what Clinton should have done and all that,” Blades said. “That’s (Monday) morning quarterbacking. I tend to be one of the least ‘telling-people-howthings-should-be’ type of people. I’m about listening and thinking about ‘OK, where are the places where we actually agree?’ ”
Last week, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who was appointed when Hillary Clinton became secretary of state in 2009, tore the scab off a wound Democrats have been tending for two decades with her response to a question about whether Bill Clinton should have stepped down.
“Yes,” Gillibrand said last week, “I think that is the appropriate response.”
Yes, the relationship between Bill Clinton and Lewinsky was consensual, as Lewinsky has maintained over the years. But Clinton was her boss, so he was also leveraging his power.
“It was a consensual relationship, but he was the president of the United States, and she was a 24-year-old intern,” said Jennifer Palmieri, a longtime communications aide to both Clintons who was Lewinsky’s supervisor at the time. “That is taking advantage of a power dynamic on a historic scale.”
Still, Palmieri said Clinton shouldn’t have resigned. Team first, after all.
Resignation wasn’t what Blades and Boyd were thinking when they came up with the “move on” petition 20 years ago while eating dinner in a small Solano Avenue restaurant and listening to people talk endlessly about Clinton and Lewinsky.
“We were business people,” Blades said. “There were opportunity costs to being obsessed with a scandal, when there was work to be done. And that’s where we were coming from. It wasn’t our love of Clinton. It was our love of country. What he did was wrong — so censure him.”
For the past several years, Blades has been working on a project called Living Room Conversations. It involves one or two hosts pulling together folks who might believe they agree on little politically, until they sit down to listen to one another’s perspectives. With civility. Anyone can start one. There’s even a guide on how to have these conversations on Thanksgiving. Four years ago, I reported on one of the first Living Room Conversations — a gathering of the Tea Party and MoveOn partisans at Blades’ home. If they could find common ground — and they found a surprising amount — anybody can.
Blades said this moment calls for us to get together and have similar trans-partisan conversations, to move beyond supporting only our political teammates. The victims and their alleged predators are from every political stripe.
Those accused must have their reckoning, but it is also a time to look forward, not back.
“(The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal) was 20 years ago,” Blades said. “There’s a lot of things we could have done better in our past. I’m looking for the conversations that are most likely to move us forward now. So infinite review of past mistakes might not be (best) — unless I see how it leads to something that’s about healing our relationships today.”