So, how exactly did Bill Clinton dodge #MeToo movement?
When Bill Clinton takes the stage at the Beanfield Centre at Exhibition Place in Toronto Friday night, there will be polite applause for the man whose wan and wrinkled face still somehow glows with the star wattage that helped win him two American presidential elections.
There will probably be sly references to Donald Trump, and friendly banter about Justin Trudeau. Clinton, always keen on mild self-deprecation, might make that old politician’s joke about how someone in an elevator said he looks like Bill Clinton, and how annoying that must be. He might even beg forgiveness for the scene in his new novel in which a terrorist hacks the computers that run Toronto’s subway and causes a derailment that kills 17 people.
One thing there probably will not be is protest of any significance.
This is Pride weekend, the World Cup is on, and the odds that many people feel a civic duty to yell and chant about Bill Clinton are low. This is not just Toronto’s uninterest. As his promotional tour for his new novel has wound around America, so far the only protests have been half-hearted and thin, reported on by local media and internet conspiracy outlet InfoWars, which is seemingly more concerned with Hillary.
“We’re protesting Bill Clinton, and basically the globalists in general,” one man told InfoWars in Austin, Texas, where five people were escorted from the event for outbursts. Outside, the few dozen protesters were notable for being almost exclusively male.
So the question arises: How did Bubba dodge #MeToo? He has a record of sexual misconduct on a level that would sink nearly any other male public figure. How is he still in good public graces in 2018, on the platinum level of the international speakers circuit? Ticket sales were at the 1,000-person capacity by Thursday night, ranging from $99 for general admission to $1,895, which includes a copy of the book, an autograph and a photo opportunity.
His new novel with James Patterson, The President Is Missing, is at the top of the fiction bestseller charts, bumping the new Stephen King down to second place. (As critic Anthony Lane wryly put it in The New Yorker, “Bill Clinton, who can write, has hooked up with James Patterson, who can’t ...”)
Bill Clinton seems to have got away clean, and aged out into grandfatherly sexual harmlessness. The claims against him are history. Juanita Broaddrick, a campaign volunteer, said he raped her in 1978. Paula Jones, an employee of the State of Arkansas, said he arranged for state troopers to invite her to his room, where he sexually harassed her by exposing himself and asking for sex, in 1991. Kathleen Willey said he groped her in the Oval Office in 1993. And of course there was Monica Lewinsky, an intern who had an affair with Clinton in the White House, and was then transferred out of her job when her superiors suspected her of being infatuated with him.
Three years ago, when Bill Cosby — not yet convicted of anything — gave a series of shows in Ontario, people gathered in the snow and cold to shout “Shame on you!”
It is not that people do not ever feel the urge to protest Clinton. In 2009, for example, when he and George W. Bush appeared together in Toronto, Front Street was a locked down security zone of antiwar protesters and police on high alert, although the demonstrations were mainly aimed at Bush’s war record.
But today, amid a revolution in awareness of sexual harassment and consent, especially in the political workplace, Clinton’s smiling face is in the newspapers, promoting a novel about a president who remarks, with no obvious irony: “They can impeach me for anything they want ... It doesn’t have to be a crime.”
Security will be tight, as usual, but it will not be for fear of rampaging crowds of protesters.
A leading theory is that Clinton got a pass on his own behaviour against specific women because his political efforts were more broadly supportive of women in general.
As Caitlin Flanagan wrote in an essay last year in The Atlantic about how feminists saved Clinton from himself: “Clinton was not left to the swift and pitiless justice that today’s accused men have experienced. Rather, he was rescued by a surprising force: machine feminism. The movement had by then ossified into a partisan operation, and it was willing — eager — to let this friend of the sisterhood enjoy a little droit de seigneur.”
He does not seem to share this insight into the contradictions of his redemption.
When he was interviewed earlier this month on NBC, reporter Craig Melvin asked whether he should have resigned and whether, looking back now, he would have done anything differently.
Viewers could see him get his back up as the question was asked. He leaned his head back, gave it a little cocksure waggle as he waited for his cue to answer, opened his mouth much earlier than he needed to, and without a word of preface about the seriousness of the matter, let alone contrition, he said: “Well I don’t think it would be an issue because people would be using the facts instead of the imagined facts. If the facts were the same, I wouldn’t (resign).”
And there was that smile, almost a chuckle.
“I like the MeToo movement. It’s way overdue. It doesn’t mean I agree with everything. I still have some questions about some of the decisions which have been made,” he said. (In a separate interview with PBS, he defended Senator Al Franken, who resigned because of sexual harassment complaints, saying “maybe I’m just an oldfashioned person.”)
Clinton said he apologized to Lewinsky, but then clarified that he had not actually talked to her, and he meant he apologized publicly. The next day on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert offered him a “do-over” to his “tone deaf response.”
Warming to the opportunity, Clinton started by saying that NBC had to “distil” the interview and it left an inaccurate impression. “And I was mad at me,” he said, as if to drive home the point that he had no reason to be.
The audience laughed.