Clinton’s belated #MeToo moment a win for everyone
Maureen Dowd
Book tours can be brutal. It took 20 years for Bill Clinton to be properly publicly shamed for the ugly bargain at the heart of the Clinton operation.
As a politician, the former president was gifted. James Carville liked to say: “People are confused. They don’t know which one they like more, the peace or the prosperity.”
Even Barack Obama was forced to turn to his former nemesis to help sell his agenda for his second term, christening Bill the “Secretary of Explaining Stuff.” And if Hillary had listened to Bill’s urgent warnings about addressing the alienation of white men in a flyover country in 2016, she’d be president.
Bill Clinton was so popular that, during his cascading scandals with women, some political analysts on the left suggested that Americans should look at a commander in chief in terms of private character and public character, disregarding personal peccadilloes and giving weight only to policy decisions.
The desire among his supporters for a liberal agenda was held hostage to Bill Clinton’s libertine appetites. Let Bill be regressive and transgressive with women he was attracted to, and he would be progressive for all women.
His wife and other prominent feminists backed Bill back then, and he and Hillary always had henchmen who were willing to smear Bill’s girlfriends and victims as trailer trash, cashfor-trash, nutty and slutty.
So it came as a surprise to him when he had no more skirts to hide behind when Craig Melvin asked on the “Today” show whether his actions in the ’90s would fly in the #MeToo era. Bill went to his usual go-to: his excellent record on appointing women. But that Faustian deal of doing good for all women while being bad with a few was no longer on the table.
“How would you have approached the accusations differently, or would you have?” Melvin asked.
“Well,” he replied, “I don’t think it would be an issue because people would be using the facts, instead of the imagined facts.”
So here are the facts, which were as clear 20 years ago as they are now.
When Monica Lewinsky came into the Oval Office and flashed her thong, Bill Clinton should have said: “Young lady, go back to your office. I am the president of the United States.” Like Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca,” Bill should have been doing the thinking for both of them.
The power differential between a 22-yearold intern and a 49-yearold boss makes any sexual interaction wrong.
It took Lewinsky herself 20 years to sort through the trauma and start moving beyond what she calls her PTSD. As she wrote in an eloquent March Vanity Fair piece, “I’m beginning to entertain the notion that in such a circumstance the idea of consent might well be rendered moot.”
It was Trump-level narcissism and selfishness on Bill Clinton’s part to force the high-ranking women in his inner circle — Hillary, Madeleine Albright and Donna Shalala — to go before the cameras and vouch for him when he knew the truth and could simply have admitted it, rather than lying, parsing and besmirching.
Monica Lewinsky has finally emerged from a long period of being frozen in amber. And that’s a relief.
And Bill Clinton has learned that his threadbare routine of maudlin self-pity and casting blame on everyone but himself doesn’t work anymore. And that is a relief.
The definition of “is” doesn’t depend on anything. It just is.