Liberals rethink support of Clinton
WASHINGTON — Another woman went on national television this week to press her case of sexual assault by a powerful figure. But the accused was not Roy Moore or Harvey Weinstein or Donald Trump. It was Bill Clinton.
“I feel like people are starting to believe and realize that I was truly sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton,” Juanita Broaddrick said on Fox News nearly two decades after first going public with her story. “All victims matter. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican. Who cares if you’re straight or you’re gay, or if you believe in God or not. We all have a right to be believed.”
The cultural conversation about women, power and sexual misconduct that has consumed the United States in recent weeks has now raised a question that is eagerly promoted by those on the political right just as it discomfits those on the political left: What about Bill?
While Fox News and other conservative outlets revive yearsold charges against Clinton to accuse Moore’s critics of hypocrisy, some liberals say it may be time to rethink their defense of the 42nd president.
Matthew 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 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.”
David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official, said Monica Lewinsky “deserves an apology from many of us she has never received.”
The emerging revisionism may influence a historical legacy that Clinton and his allies have spent the past 17 years scrubbing of scandal. Despite his impeachment on perjury and obstruction for covering up sexual liaisons with Lewinsky, Clinton until lately had made progress in framing the national memory of his presidency as a time of peace and prosperity.
But the arrival of President Donald Trump on the political stage has chipped away at that. To counter damage from the Access Hollywood tape recording him boasting about groping women as well as allegations by a number of women that it was more than just “locker room talk,” Trump recruited Broaddrick and other women who had accused Clinton to join him on the campaign trail last year.
The spate of sexual misconduct stories in recent weeks has brought those cases back into the public spotlight.
“It’s about time,” Kathleen Willey, another woman who accused Clinton of sexual harassment, said Wednesday in a telephone interview. “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 was accused of doing.”
Some Democratic leaders rejected the comparison. “I don’t think there’s any double standard here,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said last weekend on Fox News Sunday. “You were also talking in this case, as you know, about allegations of child sexual abuse.”
Clinton’s behavior, proved or otherwise, has long been an uncomfortable subject for Democrats. Many chose to defend him for his White House trysts with Lewinsky because, despite the power differential between a president and a former intern, she was a willing partner.
Lewinsky rejects the idea that she was a victim because of the affair; “any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath” when the political system took over, as she wrote in 2014.
Willey, Broaddrick and Paula Jones described unwilling encounters. Jones asserted that Clinton, while he was governor of Arkansas and she was a state employee, summoned her to a hotel room, dropped his pants and requested oral sex.
Willey, a former White House volunteer, accused him of kissing and groping her in the Oval Office. Broaddrick, an Arkansas nursing home owner, alleged that Clinton forced her to have sex during a meeting on the campaign trail in 1978.
Clinton’s lawyers have disputed all three charges, although he eventually paid $850,000 to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit by Jones without admitting wrongdoing, citing the political costs of continuing to fight it.