Author: Ellen

5/6/2014    Politico    By DYLAN BYERS

Monica Lewinsky has credited the conservative website Drudge Report with driving what she describes as her “global humiliation” in the wake of the affair with President Bill Clinton.

In a new tell-all for Vanity Fair, published Tuesday, the former Clinton intern took aim at the media circus that surrounded the scandal, singling out both Drudge and Maureen Dowd, the sardonic New York Times columnist.

“Thanks to the Drudge Report, I was… possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the Internet,” Lewinsky wrote of the influential aggregator, which covered every turn in the Lewinsky scandal.

Lewinsky said she used to call the Times columnist “Moremean Dowdy,” because of her biting columns about the affair, but added, “today, I’d meet her for a drink.”

Lewinsky, who stayed silent on the subject of the affair for more than 15 years, said she wrote the piece because she is “determined to have a different ending to my story.”

“It’s time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress,” she wrote.

Our colleague Lucy McCalmont has more on the tell-all here.

 

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/05/monica-lewinsky-hits-drudge-maureen-dowd-188043.html

4/23/2014    CNN    by Dan Merica

Storrs, Connecticut (CNN) – Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lamented the state of journalism on Wednesday, telling an audience at the University of Connecticut that journalism is now driven more by entertainment than fact based reporting.

Clinton, who has been the focus of national media attention since the early 1990s, told the 2,300-person audience that “journalism has changed quite a bit in a way that is not good for the country and not good for journalism.”

“A lot of serious news reporting has become more entertainment driven and more opinion-driven as opposed to factual,” she said. “People book onto the shows, political figures, commentators who will be controversial who will be provocative because it’s a good show. You might not learn anything but you might be entertained and I think that’s just become an unfortunate pattern that I wish could be broken.”

Clinton’s comments came as part of the question and answer portion to Wednesday’s event. University of Connecticut President Susan Herbst asked Clinton about how journalism has changed and whether journalists could help break gridlock that has halted work in Washington.

The former secretary of state went on to say that she feels there is a space for “explanatory journalism because there’s a lot going on in the world that needs explanation.”

The former first lady also had a tip for journalists: Do your homework.

“It’s important for journalists to realize that they have to do their homework too and they really should be well-prepared when they interview people, when they talk about issues,” she said. “I think that it’s with professional tweaking and creativity we could address some of the issues we know are plaguing journalism today​.”

Clinton has long been the focus of journalists’ attention, which at times has caused an acrimonious view of media.

According to the diary of Diane Blair, a longtime Clinton confidant whose personal documents gained media attention earlier this year, Clinton regularly expressed frustration and a deep distrust of the media.

In January 1995, Blair wrote that Clinton expressed “her total exasperation with all this obsession and attention, and how hard she’s finding to conceal her contempt for it all.” On Thanksgiving Day 1996, Blair wrote that Clinton thought the press was “complete hypocrites.”

“Say they want the truth, want power to be transparent, but in fact they prefer the backstage manipulation of B. Bush, N. Reagan, B. Truman, R. Carter,” Blair wrote, listing several former first ladies. “On her death bed, wants to be able to say she was true to herself and is not going to do phoney makeovers to please others.”

When her husband, Bill Clinton, was president, many in the White House worried of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” that aimed to take down the Clinton White House. Some of that concern stemmed from the rise of right wing media and blogs.

Clinton’s 2008 campaign also suffered from a sometimes tense relationship with the media. In 2008, former President Clinton railed against what he called “the most biased coverage in history,” and both Clintons complained of what they believed to be pervasive sexism dominating the campaign narrative.

In response to her remarks, Tim Miller, executive director of American Rising PAC, a conservative research and media super PAC, said Clinton’s problem with the media stemmed from “a lack of interest in transparency, not the media. She’s never going to like anyone that tries to hold her accountable.”

While in Storrs, Clinton also talked about National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, the future of the Ukraine-Russia relationship and the importance of youth participation.

Because the remarks came at University of Connecticut, a school whose basketball program won both Division I national championship in 2014, the former secretary of state also brandished some of her basketball bona fides, telling the audience that she was “a big fan” of Shabazz Napier, the men’s senior guard.

“You just busted every bracket,” Clinton said.

Clinton, who has used the last few months to travel the country and deliver paid speeches, has acknowledged that she is thinking about a presidential run in 2016. All polls have her as the Democratic frontrunner and it is likely that she would win the nomination if she won.

Former Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, who attended Wednesday’s event, said the former first lady should think about running, while Connecticut’s Sen. Richard Blumenthal said he would support Clinton “when and if she does.”

 

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/04/23/hillary-clinton-todays-media-is-more-entertainment-less-facts/

Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition [New York, N.Y]    17 Nov 1994

On Wednesday, Nov. 9, the day after the election, the New York Times surveyed a team of experts to explain the Republican tide. These commentators included liberal historians David Halberstam, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Alan Brinkley; civil-rights leader Julian Bond; George McGovern; and a token Republican, Howard Baker. Now, it may be possible to draw up a list of people who would be likely to know less about the anti-government message that was delivered Nov. 8, but it would take a lot of effort.

One of the revelations of the past two weeks has been the incompetence on the part of so many liberals in understanding and describing the GOP takeover. Conservatives basically know about liberalism; anyone who goes to the movies, listens to popular music or reads the major newspapers finds himself traveling on liberal terrain. But many liberals, it transpires, have only the haziest phantasms about conservatism, having only read each other’s descriptions of it.

The New York Times Magazine (whose slogan is “What Sunday Was Created For”) recently did a story on evangelical Christians using a tone one might adopt in the contemplation of Martians. Mr. Halberstam wrote a massive book about the 1950s that placed no emphasis on two of the most influential events of the decade, the pioneering work of Milton Friedman, which contributed mightily to the ideas behind the revolutions in Eastern Europe, and William F. Buckley’s formation of National Review, which helped to form a conservative movement that led to the Reagan revolution and ultimately the Gingrichian ascent.

While liberals such as John Judis and E.J. Dionne have actually read the conservative sources, many other liberals, especially in my neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, have reacted to the election like gaping victims of a 1950s horror movie: They don’t know what this monster is; they don’t know where it came from, or how it got so powerful; they only wish it would go away.

All of this goes to show how distant the two political cultures have become. On the one side there is the Doonesbury cohort: the smart liberal Boomers who have had their lives traced by the lives of Garry Trudeau characters — Mark on public radio, Joanie the lawyer and Hill staffer, Rick the Washington reporter. On the other side are a quite different set of cultural references associated with former professors Gingrich, Armey and Gramm — Sunbelt suburbs, John Wayne movies, grace before dinner and high-tech entrepreneurs.

The 1990s culture war isn’t a conflict between country rubes and urban sophisticates. It is increasingly fought between elites, often with similar academic credentials but radically different world views. It’s no longer outsider conservative bomb-throwers railing against the East Coast establishment. The new paradigm is the assault on Robert Bork, with well-educated activists and journalists going up against well-educated theoreticians.

Last Tuesday’s election was not simply a political shake-up; it was another step in a long cultural revolution, the rise and maturity of what Sidney Blumenthal has called the Conservative Counterestablishment. We now have two rival establishments in this country.

The full story of this election starts in places such as a motel in Tennessee a quarter-century ago, where a law student, Fred Thompson, worked the night shift sitting at the front desk reading Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind.” Now Mr. Thompson has been elected to the Senate and many of the other people who also once sat alone reading Kirk or Hayek or Oakeshott or Burke join him in important positions. Many of them manage the institutions that conservatives have created over the past 25 years, and which have spread anti-statist thinking. As GOP chronicler John Podhoretz has pointed out, unlike the Reagan victories, this was a leaderless election sweep; it was anti-government ideas themselves that permeated into all those gubernatorial, congressional and state legislature campaigns.

This conservative establishment is of course radically different in shape, size and tone from the liberal one, but also from previous Republican leaderships. The Republicans who were formed before the Reagan administration practiced a limited form of politics. With their interest in getting policies right, the George Bushes and James Bakers were either satisfied with, or uninterested in, the cultural landscape.

The new generation of Republicans practice social politics. In his first postelection interviews, Mr. Gingrich spoke about the counterculture and  the McGovernites. Mr. Gingrich set himself up for some snickering ripostes by bringing back McGovern — liberals have come a way since then and in fact liberalism is now too ethereal a thing to make an effective bogeyman. But in bringing up the 1960s, he was referring to the moment when liberals and conservatives first split into separate cultures.

Mr. Gingrich’s best moment came during the final weeks of the campaign when he stood against a withering assault by an entire world of people who declared the “Contract With America” a disastrous mistake. He insisted that no, it was actually a key to victory. That correct stand echoed another key moment, last year, when GOP strategist William Kristol stood against a similar public barrage and said that no, there is no health care crisis and the Republicans should oppose the Clinton plan, rather than merely compromise with it.

These brasher conservatives were displaying an intellectual self-confidence and Washington-savvy that has not always characterized Republican political players. Feeling beleaguered, many older conservatives ended up obsessing about and exaggerating the power of institutions that were unfriendly to them. That temper is obsolete.

The emergence of rival establishments means that the institutions of the old single establishment have lost importance. For example, the New  York Times was once the paper of record, the voice of the governing New Deal Democrats and liberal Republicans. But that group is gone, and there is no longer a role for a single paramount institution. The Times reasonably enough oriented itself toward the upper-middle-class core of Manhattan, the Upper West Side/Greenwich Village liberals. It is still one of the great papers of the world, but it is now one player among others. The more it serves its core audience in Manhattan, the less authority it will have over the rest of the nation.

Public debate between these two establishments is bound to be fierce over the next few years; the journalistic hit jobs are already getting nastier. We might be all better off to recall that establishments don’t triumph by building on the rubble of the old. They triumph by building new structures on greenfield sites and forcing everyone to move over to them.

Conservatives will have trouble acting like an establishment in part because so many conservatives love feeling persecuted and resentful, but also because conservatives are acutely aware of the dangers of establishmentarianism: insularity and snobbery.

But there’s no getting around it; if you want to run a country for a long period of time, you have to form an establishment. And establishments have one advantage: They are happier than renegade movements that feel history is going away from them. The best advice on how to win conservative allies still comes from a happy establishmentarian of the 19th century, Walter Bagehot. It is this:

“The essense of Toryism is enjoyment. Talk of the ways of spreading wholesome Conservatism through the country: give painful lectures, distribute weary tracts. . . but as far as communicating and establishing your creed are concerned — try a little pleasure. The way to keep up old customs is to enjoy old customs; the way to be satisfied with the present state of things is to enjoy the state of things. Over the `Cavalier’ mind this world passes with a thrill of delight; there is an exultation in a daily event, zest in the `regular thing,’ joy at an old feast.”

Let liberals wail and whine for the next decades; maybe it’s the conservatives’ turn to be happy warriors.

12/05/2014    Talking Points Memo    By Laura Kipnis

……

Speaking of male hysteria brings us to the case of Tyrrell’s protégé at the American Spectator, David Brock, and his biography, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham. After receiving a million dollar book advance to write a smear job on Hillary similar to the one he’d previously performed on Clarence Thomas accuser Anita Hill (Brock was famously the author of the “a bit nutty and a bit slutty” line about Hill), a strange thing happened when he tried to plunge the dagger again. Somehow he couldn’t. Sure there was the stuff about the 60s radicalism that Hillary never really abandoned, including a catty analysis of her college wardrobe. And like the rest, he spends pages enumerating her bodily crimes and misdemeanors: given her thick legs she adopted the sort of “loose-fitting, flowing pants favored by the Viet Cong” (just call her Ho Chi Rodham); along with these, she sported white socks and sandals (here, even I must protest), wore no makeup, piled her hair on top of her head, and “came from the ‘look-like-shit school of feminism.’” Even once ensconced in the professional world she cut a “comic figure” with her hair fried into an Orphan Annie perm and a “huge eyebrow across her forehead that looked like a giant caterpillar.”

But more of the time it’s an intermittently compassionate portrait of a gawky, brainy, well-intentioned Midwestern girl swept off her feet by a charismatic Southern charmer, who migrated to the backwaters of Arkansas—or Dogpatch, as Brock likes to call it—to advance Bill’s political fortunes, sacrificing herself and her principles for love. Bill repaid her by having sex with everyone in sight. But Hillary wasn’t a phony, and shouldn’t have had to play the part to advance Bill’s career, Brock insists—he even says that her physical appearance should never have become a political issue, notwithstanding the amount of time he devotes to cataloguing it.

One of fascinating aspects of Brock’s employment situation was that he happens to be gay and the Spectator happens to regularly fulminate against gay rights, as did his yappy boss Tyrrell whenever given the chance. When Brock speculates that Hillary might have been “perversely drawn to the rejection implied by Bill’s philandering,” willing to accept compromises and humiliation in the sexual arena because of the greater good she and Bill could together accomplish, Brock—who’d once thrown a gala party to celebrate the hundredth day of Newt Gingrich’s anti-gay Contract With America—could have been describing his own career arc too. The big problem for him was that he ended up identifying with Hillary when he was supposed to be vilifying her. Some mysterious alchemy took place in the course of his writing this book: instead of exposing Hillary to the world, she exposed Brock to himself. The result was a stormy break-up with his pals on the Right: he became persona non grata in his former circles.

But he and Hillary had some sort of imaginary bond, at least in Brock’s imagination. He describes waiting in line for several hours at a bookstore for Hillary to sign his copy of It Takes a Village, and where he hoped to stage their first face-to-face meeting. The question on his mind, he confesses, is what she thinks of him. But when he reaches the head of the line, faces up to the real Hillary rather than the imaginary one, identifies himself and asks when he could have an interview, Hillary’s wry reply is, “Probably never.”

 

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/ts/men-who-hate-hillary-clinton

From Whitewater to Troopergate, here’s everything you don’t remember about the Clintons.

Politico    1/1/2015

By BEN SCHRECKINGER

Hey! Remember the ’90s? If you’re like me (a millennial), you were probably too hopped up on Capri Sun and Go-Gurt to retain more than bits and pieces. Well, Important Things were happening. And judging by how much ink was spilled (this was when the news still came printed on dead trees), most of those Important Things were scandals involving Bill and Hillary Clinton. But because you can’t get a semen-stained dress past Nickelodeon’s standards department, even millennials who had their wits about them back then know only the basic outlines of these national traumas.

This is important because—as you may know if you’ve followed coverage of those midterm elections that so few of us voted in—millennial voters are totally in play: Likely voters under 30 are split nearly 50-50 between preferring a Republican- or a Democratic-led Congress, with a slight advantage toward the GOP. That makes us a challenge for Hillary—but also an opportunity, since most of us can’t tell our Paula Joneses from our Star Joneses from our Ken Starrs. In a survey Slate conducted this past spring, only 46 percent of people under 30 and 28 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds remembered the Monica Lewinsky scandal “very” or “fairly” well, compared 76 percent of older Americans. And consider this: The very youngest voters at the polls in 2016 will have been born after the Lewinsky scandal broke; as far as they know, the most controversial thing the fairer Clinton’s ever done is wear sunglasses on a plane while texting.

But the political consultants who are planning to rake in tens of millions of dollars pretending they know how to beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 smell an opportunity, too: Part of their strategy for sinking the HRC juggernaut (assuming she does, indeed, run) is to reintroduce young voters to the Clinton administration scandals of the ’90s that we might have missed. Now, a whole new generation of Americans will get to feel that special mix of disgust and apathy that only comes from reading for the first time a detailed description of the president’s penis from a woman who is not the president’s wife. As the old political saw goes: You can either beat a dead horse or you can cut it into a two-minute web video and hope it goes viral (and people who spend time around dead horses know viral).

To save the consultants the trouble, and to help enlighten my fellow twenty-somethings, Politico Magazine herewith presents a tweetable, shareable millennial’s guide to the Clinton scandals of the ’90s.

Gennifer Flowers

Imagine, if you can, the year 1991. It was a happier time. The Berlin Wall had recently fallen, Saturday Night Live was still funny and newspapers were raking in money hand-over-fist. We’re talking pre-Myspace era. Pre-Friendster even, if you believe a time that old exists.

Most Americans were satisfied with their president, George H.W. Bush, even though they thought he was kind of a dweeb. (At that point in his life, he didn’t even wear crazy socks.) His reelection in 1992 was considered a safe bet until a young Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton entered the scene. You mean that skinny, white-haired grandpa who seemed so angry at Barack Obama a while back? Yep, same guy. Except back then, he was scarfing down Big Macs and wailing on the sax with Arsenio Hall (the Jimmy Fallon of the 1990s), and he was about to become the first black president. The Democrat had energy, he had charisma, he even had an upbeat song by Fleetwood Mac (still together at the time, despite the cheating and the cocaine).

The other thing Clinton had was a libido, an open secret among the press corps and political insiders. “Everyone knew he had this baggage,” says Jill Lawrence, who covered Clinton and his administration for the Associated Press and then USA Today. “I’m not saying we expected Gennifer Flowers to have a press conference and produce recordings.”

But that’s exactly what Flowers, a D-list actress-cum-D-cup nude model, did. Well, first, she came out ahead of the 1992 New Hampshire primary and told the Star (a supermarket tabloid sort of like a less shameless Gawker of the pre-snark era) that she had had a 12-year affair with Clinton. Then, Bill went on 60 Minutes to deny the affair but acknowledge “causing pain in my marriage.” And that’s how the nation also met Hillary Clinton, who told correspondent Steve Kroft, “You know, I’m not sitting here—some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him, and I respect him, and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together. And you know, if that’s not enough for people, then heck, don’t vote for him.” It was a seminal moment in the history of cheating politicians and their spouses, as the soon-to-be First Lady of the United States pitted herself against First Lady of Country, years before the “Stand by Your Man” moments of Huma Abedin, Gloria Cain and Silda Spitzer.

That’s when Flowers held the press conference and played ambiguous tapes of phone calls with Clinton that she claimed validated her story. But because Twitter hadn’t been invented yet, and Clinton had managed to avoid mass-faxing pictures of his manhood to the public (note to Anthony Weiner: stick to fax), how could Americans be sure what was true? The tapes left enough wiggle room for Slick Willie to slide through the scandal unscathed (though years later, he would admit to having a sexual encounter with Flowers, but claimed it only happened once, in 1977).

The Arkansas governor came in second in the New Hampshire primary and dubbed himself the “comeback kid” (a phrase that, when I googled it, led to a 1980 made-for-TV movie about minor league baseball featuring Patrick Swayze. Ask your parents?). From there, Clinton won the nomination and rode high into the general election. Voters might have been pretty sure he was a serial philanderer, but they were also beginning to suspect that his opponent, Bush père, hadn’t actually meant them to “read his lips” and the prospect of four more years of boring scandals like that proved nearly unbearable. Clinton won the presidency, and a smug nation was confident it would never again elect a Bush to high office.

Travelgate

After Bill’s inauguration, the scandals came early and often. The first of these was Travelgate, a warm-up act for bigger blow-ups to come. In May 1993, Clinton aides fired the staff of the White House travel office, which—get this—was officially called the White House Travel and Telegraph Office. Instead of just replacing the office with a part-time intern and a Kayak.com account, the White House installed an Arkansas travel company with several ties to the First Family. Critics accused the administration of cronyism, and the administration accused the old travel office staff of improper recordkeeping.

This was the first scandal in which Hillary really took the lead. It appears she was the driving force behind the administration’s efforts to oust the travel staff, which included prodding the FBI to investigate the office (maybe to find out whether they were still using telegraphs?), and covering up those efforts. The late William Safire, a conservative political columnist who had nonetheless endorsed Bill Clinton for president (and also a stodgy language columnist who turns in his grave every time one of us uses emojis or shouts “YOLO”), called Hillary a “congenital liar,” and the White House press secretary announced the president wanted to punch Safire in the face. (It’s worth keeping this episode in mind every time someone over 40 tells you that civility in Washington has reached a new low.)

In the aftermath, an independent counsel would find that Hillary made “factually false” statements to investigators but that there wasn’t enough evidence to indict her. The most important thing about Travelgate, though, was that it helped to pave the way for Whitewater, the thinking man’s Clinton scandal.

Whitewater

You could be forgiven, fellow millennials, for not knowing much about Whitewater—because much of the Washington press corps never quite wrapped their heads around it either. “I could never remember what it was supposed to be about,” says Todd Purdum, a Politico senior writer and Vanity Fair contributing editor who was then with the New York Times Washington bureau. “It was so byzantine.”

Let’s go back to the beginning. Whitewater was the name of a tract of land on the White River in Arkansas that the Clintons invested in with fellow Arkansas couple Jim and Susan McDougal in the late 1970s. The plan was to wait for the land to appreciate, build vacation homes on it and sell it, but the plan didn’t work and the Clintons lost money. Then, in the mid-1980s, Jim McDougal embarked on another real estate scheme, Castle Grande. Hillary Clinton was the lawyer for the development plan, which collapsed amid federal regulators’ accusations of financial fraud.

It’s likely that no one would have ever heard of Whitewater, or Monica Lewinsky for that matter, if Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, an old Arkansas friend of the Clintons, hadn’t been found dead in July 1993 in Virginia’s Fort Marcy Park with a gun in his hand and a bullet wound in his head; a distraught letter about Washington witch-hunts was also found in his briefcase. Foster had been battling depression at the same time he got wrapped up in Travelgate (as an intermediary between Hillary and the staffer who did the firing). Many on the right rejected the logical conclusion that the political climate in Washington had become toxic enough to drive a person to kill himself, and they instead clung to the theory that the Clintons had offed Foster or pressured him to commit suicide.

In the aftermath of Foster’s death, White House staff removed documents related to Whitewater from his office at Hillary’s behest, then, in the face of questioning about it, changed their story more times than Diddy’s changed his name. In 1994, the Justice Department appointed a special prosecutor, Robert Fiske, to investigate the Clintons’ role in Whitewater and related dealings in Arkansas, including the allegation that, as governor, Bill had improperly pressured a businessman to give Susan McDougal a loan.

While the investigation was ongoing, Hillary got the chance to shine again. Seeking to tamp down Whitewater and a controversy over her miraculous run earning a 10,000 percent return in 10 months in the late 1970s trading cattle futures with no prior experience, she held the fact-filled Pink Press Conference to defend herself, so named for the color of her sweater.  She used the occasion to turn a salacious scandal into a mind-numbing logic puzzle with statements like, “I gathered all my documents together to give to my accountant. I had a year-end statement from Stephens, which did not report anything about commodities. I had a year-end statement from the Peavey Brokerage Company, which … reported a loss, and I had no year-end statement from either Clayton or the company called ACLI.”

“It was impermeable,” Purdum recalls. “But it was also an entirely accurate press conference about Whitewater.” Mostly, people were impressed with her “relaxed” body language, and in a way it was telling: The Clintons escaped unscathed, while both MacDougals and 13 other people, including a former Bill Clinton aide and his successor in the Arkansas governor’s mansion, were convicted of Whitewater-related crimes.

Troopergate and Paula Jones

Nostalgic for a good old-fashioned sex scandal, a confused public now turned its attention from Whitewater to Troopergate, a story that then-conservative journalist David Brock first reported for the American Spectator in 1993. (Yes, this was when David Brock was a conservative muckracker. More on that in a minute.) Two Arkansas state troopers claimed that they had arranged sexual liaisons with women, including one named Paula, for Bill Clinton when he was governor.

In May 1994, former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones filed a lawsuit against the president for sexual harassment that allegedly took place in 1991. This was all happening at the same time that Rwanda’s ethnic majority Hutus were committing a genocide that killed between 500,000 and a million of their countrymen. Guess which story got more coverage in the American media.

To bolster her claim that Clinton had exposed himself to her in a hotel room, Jones gave a graphic description of his penis. Her lawyers also dug up a raft of other government employees who they said had been the object of Clinton’s sexual advances. Working without the aid of Tinder, Clinton had somehow still managed to make a pass at half the women who had come within a five-mile radius of him, and when you’re the governor or president, a lot of those women work for you. It was in response to questions from Jones’s lawyers that Clinton would deny, under oath, having “sexual relations” with a certain White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. Clinton ended up paying Jones $850,000 in a settlement. But you could say it was really a wash for Bill and Hill: Brock, the guy who broke the story, repented of the right and now runs a group of left-wing nonprofits that are working overtime to protect the couple’s reputation in the 2016 race.

Monica

None of these scandals prevented Bill Clinton from cruising to an easy reelection in 1996. So, finally, the Republican Party decided to give up on the sideshows and focus on the real scandal going down in the Clinton administration: a massive deregulation of the financial services sector, backed by Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, that would lead, a decade later, to a global economic meltdown, force all of us to move back in with our parents, and destroy our parents’ retirement funds. Just joking. The Republicans were pretty much fine with all of that, as long as no one was getting blown.

Instead, the world exploded when a Department of Defense bureaucrat named Linda Tripp produced evidence that Clinton had lied under oath about Lewinsky when Paula Jones’ lawyer asked him if he’d had sexual relations with the intern. While Tripp’s motivations for nearly bringing the republic to its knees remain shrouded in mystery, she was probably interested in a book deal (#ThisTown). She had befriended Lewinsky when both were working at the Pentagon and, on the advice of a literary agent, recorded phone conversations with Lewinsky about the affair. When Tripp found out that Clinton had denied having sexual relations with Lewsinky, she offered her tapes to Ken Starr, the special prosecutor who had taken over the Whitewater investigation.

On January 17, 1998, a reclusive blogger named Matt Drudge broke the news that Newsweek—this was before the storied news brand merged with the Daily Beast, then died, then was revived to promptly accuse an elderly Japanese-American man in California of inventing Bitcoin—had killed a story by Michael Isikoff about Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky. (In homage to the Internet’s first giant scoop, Drudge has refused to update the design of his website to this day.)

This is when things really got crazy. On January 26, Bill went on national television to say, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” The next day, Hillary went on the Today Show and told Matt Lauer (then still with hair) that the steady succession of scandals had been drummed up by a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Lewinsky turned over a semen-stained blue dress that provided DNA proof of the affair, Starr pursued the perjury allegation and the fate of the government rested on whether oral sex, which Clinton eventually admitted to receiving from Lewinsky, fell under the definition of “sexual relations.” When, in August 1998, Clinton ordered airstrikes against terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Sudan (involving a group called Al Qaeda and a guy named Osama bin Laden), people who had just seen the movie Wag the Dog speculated the strikes were cooked up as a distraction from Lewinsky.

For Purdum, the most surreal moment came in August 1998, when federal prosecutors asked Clinton about the neckwear he had sported during a Rose Garden appearance on the day that Lewinsky appeared before a grand jury. Lewinsky claimed to have given him a tie. Was this the one—a message from the president for her to remain loyal? “They were thinking Clinton may have been trying to send a signal by tie,” Purdum recalls. (Hey, maybe it was more efficient than the White House telegraphs?)

The saga dragged on for months and even started taking a toll on American families. “I would get calls from my mother,” says Lawrence, who covered the seamy details day in and day out. “‘Did you have to use that phrase?’” A version of the story even seeped into millennials’ impressionable young minds. “People who had small children had to explain to them, in many cases prematurely, what a lot of phrases they heard on the radio meant,” recounts Purdum. Lawrence recalls her 9-year-old son drawing a picture, titled “Lewinsky/Clinton,” of the president staring morosely out a window with the caption, “I used to like her.” Some of you may remember this as the confusing period of adolescence when your parents let you start watching MTV as long as you promised not to turn on C-SPAN.

In December 1998, the Republican-held House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. The following February, the Senate voted to acquit. It would turn out that many of Clinton’s most zealous persecutors in the Republican Party were adulterers themselves. Newt Gingrich, speaker of the House during the impeachment vote, had run off on his first wife while she was recovering from surgery for cancer. Bob Livingston, who had been elected to succeed Gingrich as speaker, resigned the post when Hustler revealed he had had an extramarital affair of his own.

And that was the end of the Lewinsky saga… or was it? Last April, Stephen Colbert got Bill Clinton to join Twitter. As of October, @MonicaLewinsky is there too. Could the stars be aligning for a 21st-century Anthony Weiner-style Lewinsky scandal encore? Hillary’s enemies can hope against hope, but as millennials learned from the bitter disappointment of Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit Obama’s reelection campaign, the sequel’s never as good as the original anyways.

Pardongate

With the end of the ’90s came the end of the golden age of superficial Clinton scandals. On his last day in office, Clinton rode off into the sunset with a substantive scandal, issuing several questionable presidential pardons on January 20, 2001. Most notably, he pardoned Marc Rich, a billionaire fugitive from justice who was wanted on tax evasion charges and hounded by allegations of what George Bluth might call “light treason.” But Rich could be forgiven, apparently because his ex-wife had given generously to the Clinton Library and to Hillary’s fledgling Senate campaign. And this might explain why Wall Street titans are so eager to put a Clinton back in the Oval Office.

Legacy

Just as historians have come to view the World Wars as a single, massive conflict, in hindsight Travelgate, Vince Foster, Whitewater, Troopergate, Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky begin to look just as inseparable. Their legacy might be just as consequential as well: Disturbed by the power of lone women to sway the course of our democracy by recording phone calls, the good folks at the NSA resolved to just do that all themselves. Realizing that it would be better if future generations of leaders preempted scandal by incriminating themselves with semi-public photos of their escapades from the get-go, Al Gore invented the Internet and gave Mark Zuckerberg the idea for Facebook. Determined to spare the country another eight years of asinine scandal-mongering, Hillary Clinton politely ceded the 2008 Democratic primary to Barack Obama, and Washington swore off stupid distractions once and for all.

OK, that’s not how it happened. In fact, the scandals never did much lasting damage to Bill or Hillary. Bill’s approval rating shot up to 73 percent at the exact time the House was voting to impeach him (which is about 30 points higher than Barack Obama’s “strong” rating now). Hillary’s favorability rating hit an all-time high in the middle of the Lewinsky scandal, and during her recent tenure as secretary of state, more than 60 percent of Americans held favorable views of her.

“It was a secret weapon that [Bill Clinton] had,” says Joe Klein of Time magazine, who anonymously authored Primary Colors, a thinly veiled roman à clef about Clinton’s 1992 campaign that turned into a movie starring John Travolta. “Blue-collar white guys saw him messing around with lounge singers, eating at McDonalds … they just admired him. He was living large.” In other words, dredging up old scandals might not claw many millennials away from the Clintons. “I think it’s an awfully stale beer,” Purdum says.

In fact, some argue that the most lasting legacy of the scandals might be the trivialization of American media, which started long before Upworthy and BuzzFeed began clogging our Facebook news feeds. “The real scandal was the press scandal,” Klein says. “The amount of time and space we spent on things that were non-important or nonexistent.”

So, now that you know, feel free to forget quickly and clear up that mental hard drive space for more important things, like T-Swift lyrics. I’ll leave you with Klein’s compressed summary of the whole thing for the tl;dr crowd: “There was a shady real estate deal, that was just a stupid real estate deal. And then there was a blowjob, and that’s it.”

 

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/clinton-scandals-the-nineties-113905.html