Like it or not, we’re having a national flashback to the 1990s—replete with images of thong underwear near the Oval Office, semen-stained blue dresses and all manner of sordid details we thought we’d outgrown. These nostalgic tidbits come to us courtesy of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, the possible 2016 presidential contender who, anticipating a matchup against Hillary Clinton, has lately been determined to remind America what happened the last time the Clintons occupied the White House. In a series of recent interviews, Paul has resurrected the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which first surfaced in sensational fashion in 1998, when the president was accused of having an affair, of sorts, with the 20-year-old White House intern.
Paul, to his credit, hasn’t dawdled on the lurid details—rather he’s framed the discussion as a matter largely of workplace behavior, challenging Democrats’ self-image as the party friendly to women. “If they want to be credible in saying they defend women’s rights in the workplace,” Paul said in an interview last week, Democrats should “disown” Bill Clinton, whom Paul considers “a predator, a sexual predator, basically.”
Despite what Paul is hoping for, re-opening the Lewinsky scandal isn’t likely to engender a conversation about workplace dos and don’ts. Instead, dropped into a modern context, the seemingly ancient episode maybe says more about the eternal mystery of what makes for a long-running marriage, especially the singularly fascinating—and impenetrable—Clinton union.
Rand Paul’s wife, Kelley, was the one who first invoked Lewinsky, interrupting her husband during an interview with Vogue to remind readers that a Hillary Clinton presidency would mean the return of Bill to White House anterooms and corridors. “I would say his behavior was predatory, offensive to women,” said Kelley (described in the article as Rand’s “secret asset,” as well as “pretty” and a “mother of three,” because why use one cliché to describe the wife of a politician when you can use three clichés instead?). Rand Paul took his wife’s insinuation and ran with it. Asked on “Meet the Press” a couple weeks back whether he really thinks Hillary Clinton should be held to account for the 20th century misdeeds of her husband, Paul replied no, no, of course not—even as he strongly implied she should.
Blame is also owed to the media, in his way of looking at it. “I think really the media seems to have given President Clinton a pass on this,” said Paul, adding: “He took advantage of a girl that was 20-years-old and an intern in his office. There is no excuse for that and that is predatory behavior.”
Excuse me while I choke on my coffee. Those eager to dredge up the past, would be wise to dredge accurately. The suggestion that the media gave Clinton a “pass” suggests that at the time this was happening, the libertarian ophthalmologist was perhaps too busy to read what was in the newspapers.
Half the voting public may now be too young to recall the details, but as a card-carrying member of the media then and now, I can say that my workplace at the time, the Washington Post, was so transfixed by poor Monica Lewinsky that you could hardly go to the water cooler or the cafeteria or the pens-and-notebooks cupboard without being presented by a colleague with some new detail of what might or might not have transpired between the president and his beret-wearing intern. This was true at every other newspaper or magazine. The story consumed every sentient being in the nation’s capital, including dogs, cats, members of Congress and anybody remotely aware of the Starr report and its salacious footnotes, which people read out loud to one another at the breakfast table.
Rand Paul, let me tell you, and your pretty wife, Kelley: For months we in the media did nothing but live, breathe, eat, drink and dream Monica Lewinsky! The story went viral before going viral existed. More than a topic of prurient, gossipy interest, it was an exhaustive and exhausting effort to examine whether the president should be held to account for his behavior—not just in a court of law, and not just in Congress, but in the collective conscience. He was, if you will recall, impeached. That the public did not turn against en masse Clinton—at least, not forever—the way Paul would have liked is certainly not the fault of the reporters covering the story.
To be sure, we couldn’t focus on Lewinsky 24/7; sometimes we were reporting on Kathleen Willey, the White House volunteer who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by Clinton; or Gennifer Flowers, the original alleged other woman; or Paula Jones, who sued Clinton, claiming that while governor of Arkansas he invited her to a hotel room and propositioned her. Jones’s allegations prompted members of the media, including this one, to spend weeks calling legal experts to educate ourselves about the nuances of sexual harassment laws, including the difference between quid pro quo sexual harassment and hostile environment sexual harassment. We did all sorts of other kinds of eye-opening explanatory journalism, such as whether oral sex constitutes adultery, and whether adultery is against the law, and what the real meaning of sodomy is and what is legal in what state and what is not. Female reporters found ourselves in conversations with male editors that we would never have thought possible, as well as in unlikely reporting situations: I was sent to Arkansas several times during the Paula Jones era, and at one point found myself being screamed at in a Little Rock bar by an alleged Clinton mistress (she herself was the one doing the alleging) who practically splintered into angry little pieces, like Rumpelstiltskin, when I told her my paper did not pay for interviews.
Back then, thanks to Bill Clinton, sexual harassment was the gender-equity topic du jour, much as work-family balance is today, and in the end I think we actually did learn some things and move our collective thinking forward. Also helpful in this regard was Senator Bob Packwood, who in the 1990s was alleged to have made unwanted sexual advances on a number of women in ways that included chasing one around a table.
In short, I would say for those of us who lived through it, it was a strange but instructive era: one that gave us Janet Reno as the first female attorney general; Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the second female U.S. Supreme Court Justice; Bill Clinton’s advancing of women even as he was putting cigars where they should not be; feminism’s struggles to know how to think about a president they considered, overall, a friend and ally. The times might have been confusing and our reporting may have been breathless, but what the scandal was not, I would argue, was ignored.
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Rand Paul’s motives here could be many—embarrass a presumptive political rival, or raise his stature with the religious right, perhaps. Also: deflect charges that that the GOP is alienated from women, unsympathetic to their concerns and ignorant of certain basic facts about their bodies. He clearly hopes to obscure some outlandish recent commentary, like Mike Huckabee and his talk of contraception being provided by “Uncle Sugar,” by countering that Democrats are—what, exactly? Soft on workplace harassment? Workplace harassment that happened more than a decade ago? By resurrecting the scandal, he—or his “secret asset”—is trying to insinuate that Democrats remain insufficiently exercised about Bill Clinton’s behavior, and therefore are hypocritical, and that even today this should call into question their standing with women. Apparently even Hillary Clinton’s own standing with women should be called into question, despite the fact that she is one. Or something. It’s a little bit confusing.
But what if we follow him on his stated thought experiment? It is no doubt true that thousands of young people who are hearing this framing from Rand Paul have no idea what the scandal involved. But will they react as Paul seems to hope: Will they see the scandal—once they’ve consulted Wikipedia to find out what happened—as a workplace incident involving a man with a history of approaching women who are not his professional equals, and who now represents a possible menace to a new generation of White House interns?
We have been through so many wearying iterations of marital scandals since the late 1990s—John Edwards and his sycophantic videographer; Mark Sanford walking a putative Appalachian Trail while in the real company of his Argentine firecracker; Anthony Weiner and his proclivity to sext selfies of himself in his underwear—all of it enough to make you think what Bill Clinton really did was inspire a generation of politicians to exceed him in extramarital audacity. Given all that has unfolded since the ’90s, will today’s millennials be able to muster the outrage that Paul is hoping?
Or—given all of the current attention paid to parenting and its deleterious impact on marital happiness; given the insights gleaned from sociology and behavioral economics; considering the dangers of stress and the relentless pressures of the workplace—will a fresh telling of the Lewinsky saga encourage them to see something else? Given the way we talk about marriage and what makes it work, will today’s young voters instead see the whole thing as Hillary Clinton herself seems to have: the extreme outcome of a severe work-life imbalance?
Indeed, Rand Paul isn’t the only person providing a different way of thinking about the Lewinsky imbroglio. We have a new idea of how Hillary was reacting thanks to some documents uncovered this week that for several years languished unnoticed in an Arkansas archive—records kept by the late Diane Blair, a Hillary Clinton confidante who had a front-row seat during her tempestuous tenure as first lady. In her diary Blair rendered with vivid clarity Hillary Clinton’s reaction to her husband’s dalliances, which seems to have been complex and manifold.
According to Blair’s recollection, the First Lady rejected the idea that it was a misuse of power by a boss over an underling, saying that while her husband displayed (in Blair’s paraphrasing) “gross inappropriate behavior,” it was “not a power relationship” nor was it “sex within any real meaning…of the term.” (Earlier in the administration, Hillary according to the Blair documents also had felt tired of Packwood’s “whiney” accusers—after all, she “needs him on health care.”) At one point, she chose to describe Lewinsky as a “narcissistic loony tune.” Elsewhere, smart though she may be, she seemed to take comfort in the psychobabble of a letter writer who informed her that Bill Clinton’s problem was that men who are raised by two women—in his case, his mother and grandmother—have trouble committing to one.
Threaded through her reactions, though, is the suggestion that she rationalized Bill’s behavior as arising from the stress of their two-for-one presidency: the fact that they were both working so hard at their respective jobs, she working to reform health care, Bill working on being the president, and on top of that they were dealing with events including Travelgate (Wikipedia that if you have to) and the death of Vince Foster, as well as the deaths of her father and his mother, and so many other dramas and duties, that they did not spend enough time tending to one another. She was “not free enough of her own concerns and struggles to realize the price he was paying” and she “didn’t realize the toll it was taking on him.” The terrible phrase work-life balance does not seem to have existed at that time, but in finding a way to see past what had happened, she seems to have been working her way toward an iteration of it.
It’s likely that most voters will feel the statute of limitations has now passed on Bill Clinton’s behavior with Lewinsky—what he did was wrong, this has long since been decided—but Paul may yet get some of what he wants. The conversation raises the question of how people women ought to see this long and troubled marriage, one that remains mysterious even as it has gathered political force. In this way, it’s not the scandal that Paul will ultimately force us to consider; or even the workplace and what goes on there: it’s the nature of political unions, and how they seem to transform love into something else.
Liza Mundy is program director at the New America Foundation and the author, most recently, of The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners is Transforming Sex, Love, and Family.