Would war on sex predators succeed if Clinton had won?

Would the war against preying on women be blazing so fiercely had Hillary Clinton been elected?

When I interviewed women in Hollywood about the ugly Harvey Weinstein revelations in The New York Times and The New Yorker, they told me that feelings of frustration and disgust at having an accused predator in the White House instead of the first female president had helped give the story velocity.

When I talked to Susan Fowler, after her blog post about sexual harassment at Uber that toppled its CEO, Travis Kalanick, she said that before Donald Trump’s election, women in Silicon Valley were speaking up but no one was listening.

“I think it was different this year because Trump won and people felt powerless,” she said. “I know I did. I felt super powerless.”

It is also interesting to speculate: If Hillary Clinton were in the Oval, would some women have failed to summon the courage to tell their Weinstein horror stories because the producer was also a power behind the Clinton throne?

And, finally, would Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and other liberals still be saying in the past few days that

Bill Clinton should have resigned the presidency over his own sexual misdeeds if he now occupied the first lady’s quarters and reigned over a potent Clinton political machine?

Or would feminists and liberals make the same Faustian bargain they made in 1998: protect Bill on his retrogressive behavior toward women because the Clintons have progressive policies toward women? So what if a few women are collateral damage, they might ask — again. Wouldn’t you rather have Bill and Bill’s enabler, Hillary, than Donald?

You may wonder why in the year 2017, after so many graphic and scalding national seminars on sexual predation over the last 26 years, we are still trying to come to terms with it.

Perhaps because in those earlier traumatic sagas, both the left and the right rushed in to twist them for their own ideological ends.

First, with Clarence Thomas, a feminist lynch mob tried to kill off a conservative Supreme Court nominee over sex when the real reason they wanted to get rid of him was politics. Then, with Bill Clinton, a conservative lynch mob tried to kill off a Democratic president over sex when the real reason they wanted to get rid of him was politics.

Institutional feminism died when Gloria Steinem, Madeleine Albright and other top feminists vouched for Clinton as he brazenly lied about never having had a sexual relationship with “that woman” — Monica Lewinsky. The Clintons and feminists were outraged when Thomas’ supporters painted Anita Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.” Yet that was precisely the Clintonian tact when women spoke up about Bill’s misbehaving.

Time and again, Hillary Clinton was a party to demonizing women as liars, bimbos, trailer trash or troubled souls when it seemed clear they were truthful about her philandering husband. She often justified this by thinking of the women as instruments of the right-wing conspiracy.

Following the Clintons’ lead, Trump dismissed the more than dozen women who stood up to accuse him of sexual transgressions as politically motivated liars.

Are the liberals who now say Bill Clinton should have resigned because they want to clear the decks to better go after Trump, thinking that sex may be a more effective weapon than Russia to bring him down?