Why the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky Sex Scandal Made Donald Trump's Election Easier
The paradox about the Bill Clinton impeachment saga is that it made it easier for Donald Trump to be president and complicated for his wife, Hillary.
Two decades after his acquittal, it is clearer how this seismic event shaped American politics and culture today.
In the quarter century that I have covered American politics, I have only framed two newspaper covers. The first was when President Bill Clinton was impeached in December 1998. The second was when he was acquitted after completing his trial in the Senate the following February.
Washington in the late 1990s was my first overseas job. The Monica Lewinsky scandal, as we incorrectly labeled it then, was my first big story.
Framing the cover was partly a vain project to mark this personal milestone. But it also felt like a once-in-a-lifetime story. Clinton was the first president to suffer impeachment since 1868, when Andrew Johnson managed to avoid being convicted in the Senate after being indicted by the House of Representatives.
Obviously, other more experienced Washington colleagues shared this view. As I discovered in the months that followed, the same black and white cover, with the same headlines, also adorned the walls of his studios and toilets.
Veterans in the impeachment saga soon found themselves reporting on an epic cascade of events.
The 2000 presidential election, with its contentious count in Florida. The September 11 attacks. The Iraq war and its troublesome consequences. The financial crash and the Great Recession that followed. The election of America's first black president, who passed the baton to the first reality star president. Stories that are supposed to happen once in a lifetime seemed to happen every few years.
Two decades later, Bill Clinton's impeachment, however, looks like a Big Bang moment in American history.
The politics of post-truth. The poisoning of the Washington greenhouse. The delegitimization of current presidents. The corrosive impact of the internet. The rise of polarized news.
All of this was evident in the Clinton melodrama, during which The Washington Post and The New York Times plowed the same furrows as the National Enquirer, and news stories in which quotes from constitutional law experts interpreting what the Founding Fathers meant. with "high crimes and misdemeanors" they were mixed with the most lewd and suggestive snippets of the sex scandal - the tear in Lewinsky's thong, the stain on her blue dress, the president's gift to his "Leaves of Grass" book fellow ( "Leaves of Grass") by Walt Whitman, the same poetry anthology that he had previously given to Hillary Clinton.
In addition to a constitutional showdown, this was a tabloid scandal for which Vanity Fair magazine had correctly labeled the decade of the tabloids.
It provided a fitting conclusion for a time of sensationalism in which the trial of OJ Simpson, Tonya Harding, the trial of William Kennedy Smith, the sex tapes of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, the arrest of Pee-Wee Herman, had already taken place. the first accusations against Michael Jackson, the conviction for rape of Mike Tyson, John Wayne Bobbitt and his wife Lorena who cut off his penis and the divorce between Donald and Ivana Trump.
Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky brought this sensationalism to the nation's capital, where scandal has always been the highest - and often most vulgar - form of entertainment.
Washington was frantic. So much so that when I am asked today if Donald Trump will survive in office until the end of his term, I find myself remembering the early days of the Bill Clinton scandal, when it was not at all clear if the president was going to last until the end of the week.
Events were moving at such a precipitous pace and information was arriving at such dizzying speed that it was difficult at the time to step back and take in the panoramic view. A past bull, it is seen with some clarity.
The culture wars broke out
Before Bill Clinton even laid eyes on a 22-year-old White House intern, his Republican opponents questioned his legitimacy as president and sought ways to remove him from government.
It had not happened since 1912 with Woodrow Wilson that a candidate had reached the White House with such a low percentage of the national vote, a meager 43%.
Republicans were also offended that the eccentric candidacy of third-party hopeful Ross Perot had stolen the election from President George Herbert Walker Bush, despite poll data suggesting the Texan billionaire deflected so many votes from Democrats. as well as the Republican Party.
To the culture warriors among conservatives, the Clintons embodied the worst excesses of the 1960s. In Bill Clinton they saw a defector womanizer. In Hillary Rodham Clinton they saw a dismissive feminist who looked down on women who had not pursued a career of their own.
Political fear also fueled antipathy against her. Before 1992, Republicans had held the presidency for 20 of the previous 24 years. William Jefferson Clinton threatened to end that hegemony.
There was a young and articulate politician from the South, the region that had produced the last two Democratic presidents, who promised to fuse Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal with Ronald Reagan's free-market ideology.
Clinton sought to smash the Nixon and Reagan coalitions that had allowed Republicans to dominate the presidential elections and was well placed to forge a new winning Democratic coalition, incorporating white working-class voters who had become "Reagan Democrats."
His fears were well founded. Since 1992, Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the six presidential elections.
So when the Whitewater investigation, the Troopergate affair, and the Travelgate scandal failed to produce evidence of crimes that could potentially substantiate impeachment, Clinton's enemies, induced by independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr, used the affair with Monica Lewinsky as their moment. " I catch you".
Clinton's recklessness and her mendacious efforts to cover it up gave her opponents a pretext to show that she didn't deserve to be in the White House. Even Richard Nixon, whose crimes and abuses of power had been far more heinous, had not been so aggressively harassed.
The pursuit of Bill Clinton marked a paradigm shift in presidential politics. Since then, it has become routine that every occupant of the White House is attacked as illegitimate by fervent opponents.
George W. Bush, for the help they received from the conservative Supreme Court, which decided to 5-4 in his favor to end the Florida recount. Barack Obama, for the false claim that he was born in Kenya, which if true would have disqualified for the presidency. Donald Trump, losing the popular vote by more than three million votes.
US policy has reached such a low point that many Americans no longer accept the outcome of the presidential elections, thus negating the winners any electoral mandate.
Not once since the election of George Herbert Walker Bush 30 years ago has entered a president in the Oval Office without has been called into question their right to occupy the position.
A corollary to delegitimation of the current presidents has been the legitimization of policy failure, an oppositional approach that constitutional controls have been used as vetoes and obstructions.
This, again, can be traced back to the Clinton years. Bob Dole, the Senate Republican leader, used the filibuster more frequently than their predecessors to obstruct the legislative agenda of Bill Clinton. Newt Gingrich the first Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives since the mid-50 closings used the government as a political weapon.
For the religious right, especially, whose grip on the Republican Party intensified under Ronald Reagan, came the opportunity to mount a moral crusade and increase their power over the party. The more moderate Republicans, the kind of business-oriented pragmatists who had previously dominated the party, were already becoming a dying group.
Certainly, the partisan mood in Washington in the late 1990s was totally different from that of the early 1970s, when Congress began proceedings to impeach Richard Nixon, even for more serious crimes.
At that time, some of the most stubborn tormentors came from his own party. It was Howard Baker, a Republican senator from Tennessee, who asked that legendary Watergate question: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"
It was the oldest Republicans, like former party presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who traveled from the Capitol to the old Executive Office building next to the White House to urge Nixon to resign.
When the House decided to launch an impeachment investigation against the president, the vote in February 1974 received almost unanimous bipartisan support, with 410 in favor and only four against.
"The lie saved me"
Post-truth politics also received a boost from the Clinton scandal. In that direction were his first lies, including his claim that he did not have "sexual relations" with whom he referred to as "that woman, Miss Lewinsky."
In the scandal's explosive early days, when seasoned White House correspondents like ABC legend Sam Donaldson predicted he might be forced to resign in less than a week, the lies bought him time.
They helped him weather the initial storm, shore up Democratic support, and push back those who accused him.
"The lie saved me," the president confided to a close friend, according to journalist John Harris' book "The Survivor," the best book on the Clinton presidency.
The Clintons also sought to alter the question at the center of the national debate, of "who do you believe?" to "which side are you on?"
Wasn't this the logic behind Hillary Clinton's well-known interview on Matt Lauer's The Today Show, in which she accused investigators of being part of a "great conspiracy of the right"?
Early on, the White House framed the issue as a partisan battle, rather than a moment of personal reckoning. "We just have to win," Clinton told her political strategist Dick Morri, who had cynically commissioned secret polls to assess whether Clinton should lie or tell the truth.
As journalist Susan Glasser said during a panel discussion organized by Politico marking the 20th anniversary of the scandal: "It was political genius how he handled it by lying. Lying worked in a way that has allowed Washington's divisive and cynical political culture to be pushed further." .
It wasn't until the summer of 1998, when we learned that Monica Lewsinsky had saved the famous blue dress, that she grudgingly admitted the truth.
After her lies were exposed, Clinton asked television channels to make a public confession. "I certainly did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate," he admitted. But then she fired on her detractors for mounting a "politically motivated" investigation led by Kenneth Starr.
"This has gone on too long, cost too much, and hurt too many innocent people."
This time, the strategy turned against her, with veteran Democrats like Senator Dianne Feinstein expressing their dismay.
Senator Joe Lieberman, an orthodox Jew who long viewed himself as a moral totem, convicted him in the Senate. Many were horrified by Clinton's behavior.
In the House, 31 Democrats voted to launch a formal impeachment investigation. Yet no veteran Democrats publicly called for the president's resignation, in part because they didn't want to hand Republicans victory.
Even Lieberman, Clinton's leading critic among Democrats, said an impeachment would be "unfair and unwise."
Party loyalty was so strong that immediately after being impeachment by the House of Representatives into Republican hands, Bill Clinton even held a fervent rally at the White House with Democratic lawmakers behind. This partisan painting was on the cover of The Washington Post that I hung on my wall.
Hillary, the long-term loser
In part because Clinton was so adept at portraying her Republican opponents as overreaching fanatics, and in part because they did not see their sins as grounds for impeachment, Democratic voters also remained loyal.
After her acquittal in 1999, her approval rating among Democrats was 92%. When she left office, she had more approval among all voters than any previous president.
Clinton had outsmarted her opponents, and the only politicians who lost their jobs during the impeachment crisis were Republicans.
House Speaker Newt Gingrich was the first victim, resigning after Republicans lost seats in the 1998 midterm elections, which Gingrich had turned into a national referendum on the president's behavior.
Her successor, Bob Livingston, was also forced to resign on the very morning of Clinton's impeachment, after Larry Flynt's Hustler magazine exposed her own extramarital affair.
A terrible irony is that the presidency passed to Dennis Hastert, a former wrestling coach and teacher who was then seen as an irreproachable figure. In 2016, Hastert was sentenced to 15 months in jail after a petty cash case that revealed he had been accused of abusing children during his years as a teacher.
Although Clinton suffered the ignominy of becoming the second president to suffer impeachment, by far the biggest Democratic victim was his wife, Hillary, due to the collateral damage he had on his presidential campaign in 2016.
When the email muddle was uncovered, voters questioned whether they wanted to live another scandal-prone presidency, fueling Clinton weariness. The lies of that time adorned the discourse that the Clintons were evasive and unreliable.
Hillary Clinton's attacks on Donald Trump's misogyny, and her ability to capitalize on the well-known Access Hollywood film, were also compromised by her husband's affairs.
She was accused of indulging his behavior and showing little sympathy for the women who accused him. Illustratively, one of Donald Trump's first lines of defense was to assert that she had heard Bill Clinton say worse things about women on the golf course, an accusation that, even if not true, seemed plausible.
The billionaire even brought to the fore some of the women who accuse Clinton, including Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick, before the first presidential debate, a move that many commentators considered exploitative but for others raised entirely legitimate questions about the husband's sexual history. from Hillary.
Hillary Clinton, in her 2017 campaign memoir, "What happened?" (What happened?) Trashed Trump's pre-debate press conference.
"He was just using them," he wrote. But those women were accusing their husband of something much worse. Juanita Broaddrick claimed that Clinton had raped her in 1978, an accusation he has denied. Trump ended up winning a higher percentage of votes among white women than Hillary Clinton, a key factor in his defeat.
Carrying out this act of political jiu-jitsu, the billionaire adopted Clinton's strategy manual. Like Bill Clinton, he turned his reluctant television confession after the Access Hollywood tape emerged into a call for partisan mobilization: "Whose side are you on?"
As with Clinton, this bought him time, mobilized his base, and preserved his political viability.
Here, Trump also benefited from another part of Bill Clinton's legacy: redefining what kinds of behaviors are disqualifying for presidential candidates.
In 1988, Democratic front-runner Gary Hart was kicked out of the race after the Miami Herald published details about his affair with Donna Rice. Four years later, Clinton survived the Gennifer Flowers scandal, as well as allegations that she avoided military service - two accusations that, like many others, Donald Trump has survived.
Clinton normalized errant behavior and helped desensitize the electorate to womanizing politicians.
The paradox of Clinton's impeachment saga, then, is that it made it easier for Donald Trump to be president and more difficult for his wife to be. Hillary Clinton became a repeated victim of her infidelities.
The first moment of the internet
Although those framed covers, now slightly yellowed by the passage of time, captured the historical moment, they hardly depicted the media zeitgeist.
Because the Clinton scandal completely changed the metabolism of news, accelerating the shift from paper to digital, and fueling the growth of talk-show radio and cable news channels.
The public reality, which had traditionally been shaped by major television networks and prominent newspapers, was now also being shaped by new media start-ups. The Internet began to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of information.
This was the capitalized headline on the Drudge Report on January 17, 1998, a dark web page that relatively few people had heard of in what the BBC once called "wild cyberspace."
Matt Drudge, its iconoclast founder, became the first journalist to publish the name Monica Lewinsky, after hearing a rumor that Newsweek, which had explosive details of the affair, had hesitated prior to publication.
Trying not to be left behind, respected reporters in the White House, like Peter Baker who was then at The Washington Post, rushed to upload the first stories to the internet, even though many of their writing colleagues at the time did not have them at the time. permission to connect.
Newsweek posted a piece by its investigative reporter Michael Isikoff, author of the deleted exclusive, on its America Online page, instead of waiting for the next issue to hit newsstands.
When the Starr report was released on September 11, 1998, it became America's first internet moment.
Downloads of those lurid details that day accounted for a quarter of all internet traffic in the country. With CNN receiving 300,000 clicks per minute, something that seemed unimaginable in those days became a sensation. Not only was it the digital version easier to obtain than the hard copies, but the 445-page report worked like porn. She mentioned oral sex 85 times.
The captivating power of the story was infinite. So perhaps we should see the Clinton saga as the gateway drug to our current addiction to real-time information, and the outbreak of the epidemic of screen time people, especially news junkies.
What happened is that delivery systems were not particularly efficient at that time and the most powerful stimulants, Twitter and Facebook, were not yet on the market.
Just when the first pages of online news saw a surge in traffic, cable news channels saw a boom in audiences.
Before the Clinton Fox News scandal, which launched two years earlier, it was a bit of a niche channel, available in just 10 million households. By 2000, in part because of its comprehensive coverage of the impeachment saga, that number had reached 56 million homes.
MSNBC, which was also born in 1996, also became a major actor, also being a progressive counterpoint to Rupert Murdoch's Fox News.
To maintain their coverage of the scandal 24 hours a day, seven days a week, news outlets continued to blur the lines between reporting on an event and commenting on it.
The screaming partisan commentators helped fill live time and they quickly realized that the more outspoken and controversial they were, the more they were invited to return. Thus was born the culture of disagreement of current cable channels, which tended to generate more heat than light.
The radio relied on a more one-sided formula: controversial monologues by presenters whose opinions were frequently confirmed and amplified by calls from listeners.
The repeal during the Reagan years of the "Fairness Doctrine," a regulation enforced by the Federal Communications Commission that required publishing both sides of a debate, had already sparked the growth of right-wing talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh. . The drama of impeachment elevated their status to tribunes on the right, and underscored how local radio stations, especially, became a conservative sounding board.
This had a circular effect on politics, and increased the doctrinaire streak of the Republicans, especially. Polls suggested that insistence on impeachment was detrimental to them.
The 1998 midterm elections offered incontrovertible proof of this self-sabotage. However, even though there were possible exits for the Republican leaders, they continued to insist, although it was unlikely that this would end with the dethronement of Clinton.
The impeachment was not just a transformative moment. For contemporary politicians, it has also become one with pedagogical use.
What the Senate trial of Bill Clinton revealed was the difficulty of removing a president from office. Procedurally speaking, impeachment itself is relatively straightforward: it takes a simple majority in the House of Representatives to pass an article of impeachment, which in effect serves as an impeachment.
Getting a guilty verdict in the Upper House, on the other hand, is complicated. Deliberately, the authors of the Constitution set the threshold high, requiring two-thirds of the Senate in favor of the removal. Today, this would require 67 senators, a devilishly difficult number to obtain.
Back in 1998, not even all 55 Republican senators delivered guilty verdicts at the end of the trial led by then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
Not a Democrat broke ranks. In the current Senate, 22 Republican senators would have to vote against Trump to remove him from office, assuming all Democrats voted to find him guilty.
In addition to giving us a tutorial on constitutional mechanics, the impeachment saga offered a political lesson: Going after a president through this little-used process carries enormous risks. It certainly acted as a boomerang for Newt Gingrich.
This is why the new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosy, is doing everything possible to squash the conversation on impeachment now that Democrats have a majority in the House again. Understandably, he fears a negative response from voters, as well as giving Trump the kind of martyrdom that would help him in a second term as president.
So this is the double paradox of the Bill Clinton scandal and the impeachment proceedings it launched. Not only did it end up easing Donald Trump's path to the White House, it also reduced the chances of Congress trying to remove her from government.
