Bill Clinton should have resigned. What he did to Monica Lewinsky was wrong, and he should have paid the price. Matthew Yglesias
Because we are now listening to women, giving them a platform to come forward and putting credence to their stories of how male aggression, harassment and assault has affected their lives and feelings of self-worth, people are looking back at the Bill Clinton scandal through a much clearer lens, particularly reporters in the liberal media.
Two of the best articles on the subject can be found at VOX.com. One is by Ezra Klein and the other by Matthew Yglesias. They make compelling cases about why Bill Clinton should have been held responsible for his behavior, and it’s hard to disagree with a word that either reporter says, particularly Yglesias.
But while I agree with Yglesias’ conclusions about how Bill Clinton was given a pass, particularly by liberal women, the story he presents about the accusations is not the whole story, and Clinton’s liberal policies towards women’s issues were not the only reason why we came to his defense.
It’s important to remember that when Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaderick came forward with their accusations against Clinton, Jones and Willey to claim he made unwanted advances towards them and Broaderick to say he raped her, they didn’t come forward on their own, or even just with their lawyers. They came forward surrounded by Clinton enemies, men who had dedicated a good part of their adult lives and not a little bit of their fortunes trying to bring Clinton down. These Clinton haters had promoted conspiracy theories that Bill and Hillary had run a drug ring in Arkansas, had people who crossed them murdered, that Bill Clinton had fathered a mixed-race child and that the Clintons had killed Vince Foster. No crime was too heinous or too preposterous to accuse the Clintons of, they were hated with a ferocity and sense of determination not seen before in U.S. politics.
In their eagerness to come up with the “gotcha moment” that would finally stick, these Clinton haters wrapped themselves around these women and their accusations like a hungry boa constrictor, making the accusations themselves secondary to their fevered desire to destroy Bill Clinton at any cost. Whether fair or not, that allowed many of us to dismiss the charges out of hand.
The Monica Lewinsky charges arose out of an almost 8 year investigation by special prosecutor, Ken Starr, into Whitewater, a land deal in which the Clintons invested years before and lost $40,000. Who spends all of their time and energy, not to mention millions of taxpayer dollars, pursuing with an Inspector Javert-like intensity the possible corruption of an investment where the investors lost money instead of pocketing a windfall? Republicans of course. During those 8 years, we’d witnessed Starr’s merciless persecution of countless men and women, most of whom were peripheral at best to Whitewater, and watched as their lives were upended and ruined. The fact that Ken Starr would later lose his position as president of a college for covering up sexual harassment and rape allegations brought against male students under his charge was to many, poetic justice.
Did Bill Clinton have an inappropriate relationship with an intern in the White House and did he lie about it to the American people? Absolutely. Should he have resigned. All things being equal, he should have, but all things were never equal.
The first thing to make note of is that Monica Lewinsky never came forward and complained or made charges against Bill Clinton. She claims to this day that the relationship was always consensual. Does that make it ok? Most certainly it does not. But the fact that Clinton hater Linda Tripp under the guidance of her conservative Republican handler, Lucianne Goldberg, befriended Lewinsky, got her to confess the intimate details of her relationship with Clinton and then ran to prosecutor Ken Starr with them clouded what should have been a cut and dry issue of inappropriate behavior by an older man with a young woman under his influence. Then, to further muddy the waters the Republicans in congress entered the picture.
If there is anyone out there who thought that the House Republicans were anxious to bring impeachment charges against Bill Clinton for the arrogant and hurtful way he acted with women I have a bridge and a Trump Tower I’d like to sell you. The only people who shamelessly used Monica Lewinsky more selfishly than Bill Clinton and Linda Tripp were the Republican “Prosecutors” on the impeachment committee. From the moment they got their hooks into the affair between Clinton and Lewinsky, it ceased being about a man abusing his power over a vulnerable woman and became a totally political attempt to remove Clinton from the presidency. Another wrinkle added to the mix was the fact that almost half of the impeachment prosecutors had either in their past, or were at the time, engaged in the exact same behavior as the president they were trying to topple. And those were the ones we knew about. The hypocrisy was so thick in the air that Republicans were thoroughly trounced in the off-year election and one of Clinton’s loudest critics, the married Newt Gingrich, who was involved with his then aide and now third-wife, was forced to give up the speakership of the house.
Still, the Republicans pressed on, insisting on impeachment and if there had been any hope of really examining the underlying issues of sexual harassment or inappropriate relationships in the workplace, they were buried under the ugly political struggle taking place on center stage. In the end Clinton was impeached but he wasn’t convicted. He went on to finish his presidency and leave office with a high approval rating. But as Yglesias points out, he was never called to account for using the power of his position to take advantage of a young woman who was clearly infatuated with him.
Bill Clinton was caught out, and other than the humiliation of the public circus that ensued, didn’t pay a price for his unacceptable behavior. Looking back it’s clear that he should have resigned and women like me should have demanded it. My only point is that the reason we didn’t is more complicated than just the fact that he was a liberal Democrat who was good on women’s issues.
