Rethinking Bill Clinton: never a defensible guy in my book

There have been a cascade of articles in the last few days about how the Weinstein-Wieseltier-Moore revelations about powerful men using their positions to coerce sex from women should lead all of us on the progressive side of things to rethink Bill Clinton's sexual behavior, most especially the highly plausible rape allegations from Juanita Broaddrick. Here's the excellent Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times. Here's Dylan Matthews at Vox. Here's Caitlin Flanigan at the Atlantic. After all, didn't we stick up for a guy who several women charged with sexual misconduct and who we knew had a pattern of apparently thinking with his dick?

I don't feel any need to join the self-flagellation. I never was a Bill Clinton fan. The Lewinsky episode disgusted me; a president taking advantage of a misguided intern always seemed to me an unpardonable abuse of power. He was an adult; he had no business diddling a kid. A president even more than a movie mogul or a business tycoon ought to practice self-control over his appetites. He should have resigned for that alone.

And Clinton's misconduct involving Lewinsky contained another trespass. Millions of Democrats hadn't elected the guy to enable him to play with his pecker. We needed him to conserve his authority so as to govern for the people who put him in office. On election night in 1992, I found myself in a crowd of gay men whose community Republicans had allowed to die from HIV infections over the previous 12 years; they were now singing "Ding, dong the witch is dead!" This was just one subset among the constituencies -- communities of color, LGBT people, women, poor people -- that needed Bill Clinton to do the work of correcting some of the damage Reagan and Bush I had inflicted on the country's social health. It would be a fight. It always is.

Instead, Clinton weakened his presidency by playing sex games and ended up going along with one regressive GOPer measure after another: "don't ask, don't tell"; the "welfare reform" which killed federal support to poor women with children; a "crime bill" that led to mass incarceration of Black men. (Yes, there were other impediments to the Clinton agenda -- like Newt Gingrich and the GOPers -- but the guy increased his vulnerability to them with his sexual indiscipline.)

The other sexual accusations against Clinton (Jones, Willey, Broaddrick, Flowers) came from women who were promoted by his political enemies, the same people who were trying to convince us without the slightest evidence that the power couple in the White House were murderers and drug dealers. I didn't until the last few days remember even the names of the other accusers: too much right wing noise covered up the possibility these women's charges might be truthful. That's what happens when a blanket of fog spewed for partisan advantage covers the landscape. I can go along with the current assessment that we should have taken them more seriously, but their right wing sponsors, whose nonsense seemed an atmospheric pollutant hanging over the decade, were what made them invisible and inaudible to me.

At Politico, Jeff Greenfield offers a thoughtful take on Clinton and his progressive supporters.

... the center-left argued that the removal of Clinton was not just anti-democratic (overturning an election), but would be a victory for the forces of reaction. ... It also represented a complete reversal of a central feminist argument that “the personal is political,” that the behavior of men, and not just their pronouncements and policies, had to be taken into account. The new version was, “the personal is political unless the person in question embraces my politics.”

Clinton himself raised this argument when he told his cabinet in August of 1998 that his earlier assurances of innocence in the Lewinsky affair were false. His Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, upbraided him for his conduct, and noted that had he been a professor at the university she once ran, he would have been bounced for such conduct.

To which Clinton replied, according to the Washington Post, “that if her logic had prevailed in 1960, Richard M. Nixon would have been elected president instead of John F. Kennedy.”

This is, you may recognize, the mirror image of the argument Trump’s supporters made to skeptics, and what Moore’s supporters are making even as their man takes serious incoming fire. The political defense of Moore goes like this: “If Moore loses, that’s one less vote for tax cuts, conservative judges, traditional values. (Well, they might want to shelve that one). We can’t let our problems with personal conduct override the enormous political stakes.”

... For many of us, it is easy to look at of Weinstein, Trump and Moore as case studies in pathological behavior. Looking closer to home is a lot more painful; it is also compulsory. Unless and until partisans across the board stop justifying unconscionable behavior out of political self-interest, the more likely it is that the pervasive cynicism about the process, and everyone involved in it, will fester and grow.

More focus on what government is for and what political efforts we are trying to win through it, coupled with more women in positions of power (though we aren't immune to the temptations of misbehavior), might help.