Hillary Rodham Clinton, in an interview with People magazine released Wednesday, said she had “moved on” from the Monica Lewinsky scandal that dominated her husband’s second term as president.
In an interview timed to the publication of her memoir “Hard Choices,” Mrs. Clinton said she did not take time to read an essay by Ms. Lewinsky that Vanity Fair published last month about the Clinton affair and her life since then. “I think everybody needs to look to the future,” Mrs. Clinton said.
And asked about published reports that she called Ms. Lewinsky a “narcissistic loony toon” after the affair became public, Mrs. Clinton said, “I’m not going to comment on what did and didn’t happen.”
The brief comments are the first time Mrs. Clinton has publicly addressed questions about Ms. Lewinsky since the scandal was revived in recent months, partly by conservatives and partly by Ms. Lewinsky’s Vanity Fair article.
The People cover story, accompanied by photographs of Mrs. Clinton walking her dogs, is part of a media blitz for the June 10 publication of “Hard Choices.” On Monday, Mrs. Clinton will sit down with Diane Sawyer of ABC News for an interview, and she is also scheduled to make appearances on the other major broadcast networks as well as on CNN and Fox News.
In the People interview, Mrs. Clinton discusses her life since leaving the secretary of state’s job last year: cleaning out her closets (“very calming”); doing yoga and aquatics (“not as much as I should”); and binge-watching the Netflix series “House of Cards,” a Washington-based political thriller.
She said she was trying not to dwell on any decision about running for president in 2016. “With the extra joy of ‘I’m about to become a grandmother,’ I want to live in the moment,” she told the magazine. Her daughter, Chelsea, announced in April that she was pregnant and expecting her first child in the fall.
“At the same time,” Mrs. Clinton added, “I am concerned about what I see happening in the country and in the world. Through the next months, I will think more about what role I can or, in my mind, should play.”
The Lewinsky scandal re-emerged in January after Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, brought it up in addressing criticism that the Republican Party had waged “a war on women.” President Bill Clinton, he countered, had taken advantage of a young intern. “That is predatory behavior,” Mr. Paul said on the NBC News program “Meet the Press.”
The next month, The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, published a trove of White House-era documents from Diane D. Blair, a close friend of Mrs. Clinton’s who died in 2000. The Blair papers included diary entries based on conversations with Mrs. Clinton. According to those entries, Mrs. Clinton called Ms. Lewinsky a “narcissistic loony toon” and said the relationship with Mr. Clinton was consensual.
Then, in May, Ms. Lewinsky — who was a 22-year-old White House intern during her relationship with Mr. Clinton — posed in a white dress for the Vanity Fair article. In the essay, she said she found Mrs. Clinton’s “impulse to blame the woman — not only me, but herself — troubling.”
As her press blitz continues, Hillary Clinton says she wants to “live in the moment” – including enjoying her new role as a grandmother-to-be – as she weighs a run for the presidency in 2016.
In an interview in PEOPLE Magazine, the former secretary of state offers yet another statement that she has “a decision to make” about a run, even as her aggressive media strategy appears to point to efforts to put past controversies behind her in preparation for a campaign.
In the interview, part of a wide-ranging publicity schedule surrounding the release of her memoir, Hard Choices, Clinton also said that she’s “moved on” from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. And she declined to comment on reports that she called the famous White House intern “a narcissistic loony tune.”
Clinton also addressed questions about her health, saying that she has no lingering symptoms after a head injury.
“I did have a concussion and some effects in the aftermath of it, mostly dizziness, double vision,” she said. “Those all dissipated. Blood thinners are my continuing treatment for the blood clot.”
Answering questions about her life after Foggy Bottom, the onetime first lady described her love of the Netflix show “House of Cards” and her bliss at being able to sleep in “to probably 8 o’clock.”
Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, announced this spring that she and her husband Marc are expecting their first child later this year, a life change that Hillary Clinton says is a factor in her decision about a 2016 campaign.
Video – Chelsea Clinton: I’m Very Excited About First Child
“Part of what I’ve been thinking about, is everything I’m interested in and everything I enjoy doing – and with the extra added joy of ‘I’m about to become a grandmother,’ I want to live in the moment,” she said. “At the same time I am concerned about what I see happening in the country and in the world.”
National Geographic Channel released the names of six people who had “unanticipated brushes with fame” in the 1990s, and will participate in the network’s upcoming documentary The 90′s: The Last Great Decade?Among them: Monica Lewinsky, whose “unanticipated” brush with fame involves having an affair with the President of the United States, spilling the beans, saving the dress, and being stunned by the reax in Washington and in the media. Lewinsky is best known these days as the media victim who “stalks her past, yanking us back to when she flashed her black thong,” as Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times back in 2002, when Lewinsky came to the TV Press Tour after successfully pitching to HBO a documentary about herself, for which she reportedly was paid $150,000. In today’s announcement, NatGeo is happy to play along with Lewinsky’s carefully crafted storyline, calling her the “White House intern whose relationship with Bill Clinton led to her becoming a legal target in an investigation and a media target like the world had never seen before.”
This year, Lewinsky re-emerged, having penned a piece about her victimhood — regrets the affair, dreads a Hillary Clinton run in 2016 because the paparazzi are sure to stalk her, etc. – for Vanity Fair. The left thinks the piece was orchestrated by the right, to embarrass presumed presidential candidate Clinton, but Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne, has told Fox News Channel she believes it was orchestrated by Hillary’s camp to get it out of the way now.
Other newly named docu participants joining Lewinsky in the newly released Unanticipated Brushes With Fame-rs list include:
– Kevin Powell and Julie Gentry, who signed on for the first edition of MTV’s The Real World and “helped to create the reality TV revolution.”
– Christopher Darden, the Los Angeles DA assigned to the prosecution team trying OJ Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife and her friend.
– Richard Dean, an employee of the Social Security office at the federal building on Oklahoma City who saved the lives of three people in the blast that killed 168.
– Titus Murphy, who sped to the scene of the attack on truck driver Reginald Denny as it played out live on TV, in the wake of the Rodney King verdict, and helped Denny to safety.
– Judy Sheppard, whose son, Matthew was beaten, tortured, and left to die because he was gay.
Remind me, why does NatGeo believe the 90s should even be considered for Last Great Decade status?
Lewinsky and the rest of the gang will join previously announced participants Jason Alexander, Roseanne Barr, Shannen Doherty, Vanilla Ice, Courtney Love, Matthew Perry, Martin Sheen, James Van Der Beek, Colin Powell, Tony Blair, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani.
The nation’s capital: It’s the richest, gayest, most educated, most expensive and most economically optimistic place in America.
You’ve heard some of those superlatives, right? Take them with a big grain of skepticism.
When government agencies or private research groups release state-by-state information, they often include the District of Columbia. That makes sense. Citizens of the district are part of this country (albeit without the same democratic rights as other citizens).
Photo
Number 9 Bar in Washington, D.C., is popular with gay men. CreditVanessa Vick for The New York Times
But even if Washington deserves a place on national lists alongside the 50 states, it isn’t very similar to any of them. It’s a city. And cities are, by and large, richer, gayer, more educated, more expensive and more economically optimistic. Take education. The typical ranking of states makes Washington look to be by far the most educated place in the country. About 50 percent of its residents have at least a bachelor’s degree. No state exceeds 40 percent. But a ranking of cities looks different: Washington still does very well, but is in third place, not first. Seattle (56 percent) and San Francisco (51 percent) are both more educated.
I suspect the Washington superlatives make the rounds because they’re easy to make, because the city is filled with journalists and because the comparisons feed the irresistible storyline of Washington-as-bizarre. But before we pronounce Washington special, for good or ill, it’s worth asking whether we’re fooled ourselves.
(I tip my Washington Nationals cap to Byron Tau of Politico, who had a succinct tweet on this issue Wednesday.)
TheWrap analyzes election records to determine which Hollywood players are giving to which candidate in Congressional campaign
The primary election to fill Henry Waxman’s Congressional seat isn’t until June 3, but so far California Democrat Matt Miller is winning the race for Hollywood’s pocketbook.
The Democratic contender pulled in nearly $30,000 more in campaign contributions from Hollywood power players than his nearest rival, Wendy Greuel, in the first quarter of 2014, according to TheWrap‘s analysis of Federal Election Commission filings.
Greuel once worked for DreamWorks and was considered Hollywood’s favored candidate. She also has the benefit of name recognition due to her failed mayoral race against Eric Garcetti.
Miller, a political columnist and radio host, drew $67,900 from figures including A-list writer-producer Roberto Orci; former studio executive Sherry Lansing; and J.J. Abrams, who also donated a lesser amount to Greuel’s campaign.
Though Greuel received 60 percent of Miller’s Hollywood contributions — $41,000 — the former Los Angeles City Controller leads the Democratic race overall with $672,215 in non-loan donations.
Marianne Williamson, an Independent candidate, has so far appealed to Hollywood mainstays like Nancy Sinatra and actress Dana Delany to rank third in our analysis of Hollywood donations.
Rounding out the list is Ted Lieu, the California State Senator who received the official endorsement of the Democratic Party. Lieu’s donor list is populated with legal and medical professionals; the biggest entertainment name of note is an senior VP from Warner Bros., Howard Welinsky.
Our methodology included a line-by-line analysis of itemized receipts for the first quarter 2014, as listed on the FEC’s website. Though many individuals with direct or tangential relationships to the entertainment industry also made contributions, we focused on “power players” as defined by influential decision making authority or clout.
You can see exactly who we included on the charts below.
Over the 25 years Hillary Clinton has spent in the national spotlight, she’s been smeared and stereotyped, the subject of dozens of over-hyped or downright fictional stories and books alleging, among other things, that she is a lesbian, a Black Widow killer who offed Vincent Foster then led an unprecedented coverup, a pathological liar, a real estate swindler, a Commie, a harridan. Every aspect of her personal life has been ransacked; there’s no part of her 5-foot-7-inch body that hasn’t come under microscopic scrutiny, from her ankles to her neckline to her myopic blue eyes—not to mention the ever-changing parade of hairstyles that friends say reflects creative restlessness and enemies read as a symbol of somebody who doesn’t stand for anything.
Forget all that troubled history, and a Clinton run for president in 2016 seems like a no-brainer, an inevitable next step after the redemption of her past few years as a well-regarded, if not quite historic, secretary of state. But remember the record, and you’ll understand why Clinton, although rested, rich and seemingly ready, has yet to commit to a presidential race (people around her insist it’s not greater than a 50-50 proposition), even as she’s an overwhelming favorite.
If Clinton says yes, she’ll have access to a bottomless pool of Democratic political talent and cash to match all those hyperbolic pronouncements about her inevitability. If she doesn’t run, the single biggest factor holding her back will be the media, according to an informal survey of three dozen friends, allies and former aides interviewed for this article. As much as anything else, her ambivalence about the race, they told us, reflects her distaste for and apprehension of a rapacious, shallow and sometimes outright sexist national political press corps acting as enablers for her enemies on the right.
Clinton isn’t insane, and she’s not stupid. “When you get beat up so often, you just get very cautious,” says Mike McCurry, her husband’s former press secretary, who joined the White House team to find a first lady traumatized by the coverage of her failed Hillarycare initiative. “She [has] had a very practical view of the media. … ‘I have to be careful, I’m playing with fire.’”
And while the white-hot anger she once felt toward the media has since hardened into a pessimistic resignation (with a dash of self-pity), she’s convinced another campaign would inevitably invite more bruising scrutiny, as her recent comments suggest. Public life “gives you a sense of being kind of dehumanized as part of the experience,” she lamented a few weeks ago to a Portland, Ore., audience. “You really can’t ever feel like you’re just having a normal day.”
When asked why Clinton hasn’t done more to reach out to reporters over the years, one Clinton campaign veteran began to spin several theories. She was too busy, she was too prone to speaking her mind and the like—then abruptly cut to the chase:
“Look, she hates you. Period. That’s never going to change.”
10 Moments That Illustrate The Right-Wing Radio Host’s Fringe Viewpoints And Disdain For Civil Discourse
ABC host George Stephanopoulos announced on This Week that talk radio host and Fox News contributorLaura Ingraham is the network’s “newest contributor.” On her syndicated radio program The Laura Ingraham Show, Ingraham has repeatedly engaged in inflammatory and hateful rhetoric, lobbing numerous attacks against everyone from President Obama to people who receive government assistance to her favorite target, immigrants.
Here are 10 hateful moments from Ingraham in the past year:
1. Ingraham Used A Gunshot Sound Effect To Cut Off A Replay Of Rep. John Lewis’ March On Washington Speech. During her coverage of the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington in August 2013, Ingraham criticized the event and its speakers, saying the goal “was to co-opt the legacy of Martin Luther King into a modern-day liberal agenda.” She then played a clip of a speech from Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), who was the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, abruptly interrupting the playback of his comments with the sound of a loud gunshot. Following criticism of this sound effect, Ingraham defended her use of the gunshot sound, instead calling it a “blow up effect” and claiming that criticism of her using the sound effect on Lewis was an attempt “to crush free speech.”
2. “Hillary Clinton Should Be Absolutely Crucified For Her Lack Of Performance As Secretary Of State.”On her August 2, 2013, radio show, Ingraham lobbed attacks against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton while discussing foreign policy, claiming that the rest of the world is “emboldened by Barack Obama’s weakness” and that Clinton “should be absolutely crucified for her lack of performance” as secretary of state.
3. Ingraham Repeatedly Mocked An Immigration Protestor For Speaking English With An Accent. In November 2013, Ingraham repeatedly mocked a woman who was protesting the Obama administration’s record number of deportations, saying, “Wait, what did she say at the end? I can’t — I need a translator. I speak Spanish too. I’d rather have her just speak Spanish, at least I’d understand that.” She then went on to affect the woman’s accent, stating, “No want more amnesty. No want more lies. No want more phony promises. No want more people coming into the country, filling up our schools and our emergency rooms, having anchor babies and then blaming us for it. No want more that.”
4. Ingraham ClaimedImmigration From Mexico Would Turn U.S. Into A “Hellhole.” Ingraham used a May 2013 hearing on immigration reform to claim that immigration from Mexico would create a “hellhole” and a “mini-Mexico,” saying, “I think a lot of you look around at this culture of ours, and some of it is our own fault, but we see America disappearing. I’m not even talking about demographics, I’m talking about our culture.”
5. Ingraham Equated Negotiating With President Obama To Negotiating With Castro On Human Rights.While discussing immigration reform in August 2013, Ingraham claimed that Democrats wanted to a “forge a permanent majority in the U.S. government, which is what they wanted all along.” She continued, “Small government conservatives willing to sit down and forge a comprehensive deal with Barack Obama on immigration. I mean, if you’re willing to do that, you might as well be willing to sit down with Castro and talk about human rights, because he’s had such a great record on that.”
6. Ingraham: People Who Use Food Stamps Are The Next Hurricane Katrina “Roof Squatters.” While discussing the House of Representatives’ passage of the farm bill in July 2013, Ingraham lamented the number of people who use food stamps, saying, “44 million people sucking on the — of the government. You know, the udder of the government.” She went on to say of food stamp recipients, “The next thing you know, they’re going to be standing on the roof, waiting for the helicopters to rescue them, right, the roof squatters during Hurricane Katrina.”
7. Ingraham Threatened To Personally Primary Challenge Republicans Who Support Immigration Reform. In May and June of 2013, Ingraham launched a series of attacks against Republican politicians whom she perceived as supportive of immigration reform, going so far as to claim that she would “primary challenge [Arizona] Senator Jeff Flake [her]self.” She also stated that she would look into running against Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham for his immigration policies, saying, “people think I’m joking, I’m actually not joking,” and later asserted that she would campaign against any House Republican who supported comprehensive immigration reform.
8. Ingraham Smeared The American Children Of Undocumented Immigrants As “Anchor Fetuses.”Ingraham’s attacks against pro-immigration reform Republican politicians were accompanied by numerous smears against immigrants and Latinos, including referring to the American children of undocumented immigrants as “anchor fetuses” during a discussion about Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) “embrace of the path to citizenship” in May 2013.
9. Ingraham Compared Obama’s Immigration Policies To “Spousal Abuse.” Ingraham invoked a “spousal abuse” analogy in February to describe President Obama’s immigration policies, claiming, “The administration led by Barack Obama are abusers of our Constitution.”
10. “We Can Then Wall Off Detroit” If Immigrants Move There. In January, Ingraham derided Michigan Republican Gov. Rick Snyder’s plan to attract skilled immigrants to work and live in bankrupt Detroit, saying, “we can then wall off Detroit” to keep those immigrants from moving to other parts of the country.
Again? But the harder their enemies hit, the stronger the couple becomes.
4/8/2014 | New York Magazine
Hillary Clinton, in 1996, before testifying to a Whitewater grand jury.
About the only political conviction uniting Americans in Election Year 2014 is that Election Year 2016 will be about Hillary Clinton. The likelihood of her unannounced candidacy has stilled the rest of the slim Democratic field, forged a truce among most of the party’s congenitally warring factions, and induced past Clinton antagonists like David Geffen to disarm. At the fractured GOP, where the presidential timber is as thick as a forest if not as towering, Hillary is also a unifier of sorts as the de facto opponent-in-waiting. And Republicans are fine with that too. With the Clintons, you get scandal and the serious shot at victory that Clinton-scaled scandal seems to promise, even if you have no candidate of comparable stature to pit against them.
Such is the right’s undying theory, anyway. But what scandal are we talking about this time? There’s Benghazi, of course, pounded daily at every conservative venue, as it has been since emerging mid–Romney campaign as a last-ditch hope for bringing down the Obama administration. But Benghazi will be a nonfactor in 2016, as it was in 2012, because most voters don’t give a damn—any more than they care about Vladimir Putin’s Crimea grab, which will also be pinned on Clinton’s reign at State—in no small part because the Bush administration’s Iraq fiasco depressed public engagement in foreign affairs for a generation. A more promising alternative might be the persistent odor of sleaze that trails the Clinton Foundation, the subject of both New York Times and Washington Post scrutiny last summer. As Alec MacGillis of The New Republic summed up what we know thus far about the Clinton Global Initiative, there’s “an undertow of transactionalism in the glittering annual dinners, the fixation on celebrity, and a certain contingent of donors whose charitable contributions and business interests occupy an uncomfortable proximity.” Those proximities will be fodder for many dense flowcharts to come, as will the tentacles of Hillary’s extreme speaking fees (an estimated $400,000 for two talks to Goldman Sachs alone).
Yet what the right really wants to talk about when it talks about the Clintons is none of the above. The conversation will quickly turn to sex. It always does. It always has. And it already is.
The sex talk began after New Year’s. Rand Paul, the closest the GOP has to a presidential front-runner, denounced Bill Clinton’s “predatory behavior” with women on Meet the Press. Fox News played host to Kathleen Willey, whose charge of an Oval Office sexual assault by Clinton, made on 60 Minutes in 1998, remains unsubstantiated, as does her insinuation that he played a role in her husband’s suicide. The Washington Free Beacon, a rising right-wing website, mined the Diane Blair papers, the archives of a deceased political-science professor and Hillary friend held at the University of Arkansas. The most breathlessly bandied discovery: an undated letter to an unknown addressee, circa 1976, in which Bill Clinton, just turning 30, “closed by confessing that he had fallen asleep the night before while reading an erotic love poem from the seventeenth century.” (That would be Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.”) At another right-wing outlet, the Washington Examiner, the pundit Michael Barone alerted his readers in late March that “a decade ago,” Clinton traveled on “the private plane of a man later convicted of having sex with a minor.” It apparently hasn’t occurred to these outraged moral arbiters that the projection of sex scandals onto a couple campaigning as beloved national grandparents—Bill Clinton turns 70 in 2016, Hillary 69—will strike many Americans as ludicrous.
The mainstream press is nonetheless following the right’s lead, as it did last time under the merry tutelage of Matt Drudge. In late February, Politico posted a helpful Cliffs Notes remembrance of Clinton scandals past, pegged to the fact that thousands of pages of documents had yet to be made public by the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock. These secret files, we were told, will “fuel media attention to the Clintons’ past and pose a threat to Hillary Clinton’s possible presidential ambitions in 2016.” A slideshow revisits Whitewater, Travelgate, and the Rose Law Firm—all of which failed to incite mass indignation (or much public comprehension) when litigated ad infinitum two decades ago, and none of which resulted in proof of criminal wrongdoing by the Clintons. But these are just amuse-bouches before the main courses on the menu: Vince Foster and Monica Lewinsky. Foster was the Hillary Clinton law partner and friend who shot himself while serving as deputy White House counsel but whom Clinton haters tried for years to portray as a murder victim, silenced to cover up a supposed affair with Hillary. (According to Foster’s wife, among others, there was no affair, and the police and two independent counsels all concurred that Foster had committed suicide while suffering from clinical depression.) Lewinsky remains the only old Clinton scandal that needs no introduction. That incident of extramarital oral sex and the lying that accompanied it led to the sole impeachment in American history of an elected president. Clinton was acquitted of the charges in the Senate and in public opinion. One can only imagine what the House managers of his 1999 Senate trial—among them Lindsey Graham—make of the March Wall Street Journal–NBC News poll in which Clinton ties with Pope Francis for the highest approval rating among a slate of world figures. (Hillary follows right behind.)
Undaunted, the GOP is back on sex patrol. Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, tweeted in February: “Remember all the #Clinton scandals … That’s not what America needs again”—an acknowledgment that Clinton scandals are exactly what his party does remember and does need again, whether America needs them or not. Priebus elaborated to Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC that a Hillary run “provides a lot of opportunity for us” and that “everything’s on the table.” You don’t need a slideshow to surmise what “everything” is a euphemism for.
The Democrats will publicly scold the Republicans for recycling yesterday’s garbage. But in private they should pray that Priebus and his camp will bring it on—the old Clinton sex scandals and, better still, some new ones, real or fantasized, the more women the better. The received wisdom that sex scandals threaten a Hillary run is preposterous. It’s the reverse that’s true. The right’s inability to stanch its verbal diarrhea on the subject of female sexuality—whether provoked by rape, contraception, abortion, “traditional marriage,” gay marriage, gay parenting, or pop culture—did as much as anything to defeat Mitt Romney, his “binders full of women” notwithstanding, in 2012. (He lost women voters to Obama by 11 percentage points.) And that obsession with sex can defeat the GOP again. Todd Akin, the avatar of “legitimate rape,” may be gone, but many of the same political players will be in place in 2016 as in 2012—more than a few of them alumni of the Clinton sexcapades of the 1990s. No matter how much Republican leaders talk of reining in their sexist language (though not their policies) to counter charges that the GOP conducts a war on women, they just can’t help themselves. Whether or not there’s a war on women in 2016, there will be a rancorous and tasteless war on one woman. And it is guaranteed to backfire, drowning out fair G-rated questions about the Clintons’ dealings just as Monica and other “bimbo eruptions” drowned out such now-forgotten Clinton scandals as Filegate and Castle Grande.
To appreciate how inexorably the Clintons will seduce the GOP into another orgy of self-destruction, it helps to recall the tone of the insanity the couple induced among their opponents the first time around. That recent past has been obscured in the American memory by the rise in Bill Clinton’s stature and, most of all, by the subsequent detour of right-wing ire to a new hate object in the White House, an actual black president as opposed to merely an honorary one. In addition, many Americans who will vote in 2016 are too young to have grasped or witnessed the Clinton craziness firsthand. (Some first-time 2016 voters weren’t yet born when the Lewinsky story broke in early 1998.) They may be startled to discover what they missed. Only a novelist could capture the mood back then, as Philip Roth did in The Human Stain: “In the Congress, in the press, and on the networks, the righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore, and punish, were everywhere out moralizing to beat the band … all of them eager to enact the astringent rituals of purification that would excise the erection from the executive branch, thereby making things cozy and safe enough for Senator Lieberman’s ten-year-old daughter to watch TV with her embarrassed daddy again. No, if you haven’t lived through 1998, you don’t know what sanctimony is … It was the summer when a president’s penis was on everyone’s mind.”
If you revisit the avalanche of contemporaneous Clinton-scandal journalism—if journalism is the word for it—you discover that even the high end of Clinton hatred was crazy and creepy. Take the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal—then still owned by the Bancroft family, not the unabashedly agenda-driven Rupert Murdoch. So voluminous was its scandal coverage, and so highly did the Journal estimate its historical import, that the output was collected in six books published from 1994 to 2001 under the umbrella title Whitewater: A Journal Briefing. The complete set weighed in at 3,213 pages, with a collective list price of $100. In the last of these Whitewater volumes, only 15 of 429 pages make any mention of Whitewater itself, so far afield had the Journal ventured from the original scandal (which even it conceded was “a two-bit land deal in the Ozarks”) into True Detective–esque swamps of sexual fever and its noir companions, drugs and murder. Along with the many assessments of Bill Clinton’s alleged paramours in the Whitewater collection, there is an editorial plugging The Clinton Chronicles, a hugely popular video that perpetuated the “Body Count List”—a running tabulation of mysterious deaths linked to the First Family. (The count would rise above 50.) While the Journal is skeptical of some of the video’s contents, it praises it anyway for getting at “something important about the swirl of Arkansas rumors” and recaps as many of the suspicious deaths as it can pack in. The Whitewater books also spill rivers of ink on the goings-on at a rural airstrip where drug running, money laundering, and the Iran-contra scandal were all said to intersect—but whose sole overlap with the Clintons was its location in the state of Arkansas. It was the Journal’s editorial page, too, that ran an excerpt from Unlimited Access, a tell-all book by Gary Aldrich, a former FBI agent who served in the Clinton White House. Aldrich claimed that Bill Clinton frequently snuck out of the White House in the dead of night, camouflaged by a blanket in the backseat of a car, to have assignations at a Marriott Hotel in downtown Washington. He also accused Hillary Clinton of countenancing pornographic White House Christmas-tree ornaments, among them two turtledoves “joined together in an act of bird fornication” and “five gold-wrapped condoms.” With the imprimatur of the Journal and ABC’s This Week as a send-off, this work of fiction reached No. 1 on the Times’ nonfiction best-seller list.
When you read all this stuff at a somewhat historical remove of 15-plus years, what emerges is how gratuitously Hillary Clinton is often dragged into charges leveled at her husband, the Clinton actually holding public office, and how frequently she’s the victim of drive-by character assassination. The Journal bizarrely faults her for wearing a “pink suit” when “defending her $100,000 commodities market killing” and holds her accountable for having “had a good deal to do with setting the legal and moral tone of her husband’s administration.” Such tortured logic reached its pinnacle in a sensational 11,000-word investigation of Troopergate in the right-wing rag The American Spectator. Troopergate—not to be confused with Travelgate, which the Spectator hawked with a cover drawing of Hillary on a broomstick—alleged that Bill Clinton, while Arkansas governor, used state troopers to procure women for sex. Yet Hillary is damned along the way on grounds like these: “She would phone the mansion from her law office and order troopers to fetch feminine napkins from her bedroom and deliver them to her at her law firm.” Besides being utterly implausible, this accusation is a non sequitur, and never would have been included if, say, Kleenex were being fetched instead of feminine napkins. But such reportage is in keeping with the misogyny that underlies much of the Clinton literature, including the epic report delivered to Congress and the public by the puritanical independent counsel Kenneth Starr. As the fierce Clinton aide and defender Sidney Blumenthal would later point out in a memoir, Starr kept interrupting his prurient through-the-keyhole account of Bill Clinton’s priapism with weird asides about the First Lady’s whereabouts: “Mrs. Clinton was in Africa … Mrs. Clinton was in Ireland.” The point, Blumenthal writes, is that Starr “wishes her to be stained as well,” for “there is no other reason for her inclusion.”
The Troopergate story was written by David Brock, a self-described right-wing hit man who made his bones by maligning Clarence Thomas’s accuser, Anita Hill, as a sex freak (“a little bit nutty … a little bit slutty”) in a best-selling book as the Clintons arrived at America’s center stage. Brock would later recant his entire canon, become persona non grata among his old circle, create the liberal media-watchdog operation Media Matters, and morph into the Clinton wingman he is today. He is a contradictory figure, to put it mildly, but his 2002 book about his political change of heart, Blinded by the Right, owns up unstintingly to his own misogyny and is specific and persuasive about its prevalence in the right’s ranks. He tells of both the Starr deputy Brett Kavanaugh (now a George W. Bush–appointed judge on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit) and the literary agent Glen Hartley (still a prominent representative of conservative authors) calling Hillary Clinton a “bitch.” Ron Burr, the American Spectator publisher, implored him, “Can’t you find any more women to attack?”
In a telling moment of the 2008 campaign, John McCain didn’t object when a female supporter, referring to the still extant presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, asked him, “How do we beat the bitch?” McCain’s silence may say less about his character than about the status quo of a party where such thinking and locutions are business as usual; Ted Nugent and Glenn Beck described Hillary as, respectively, a “worthless bitch” and a “stereotypical bitch” in that same election cycle. Sex-tinged Hillary hatred on the right has dimmed nary a bit since the Clintons left the White House. It’s almost impossible to keep up with all the book-length screeds. In American Evita (2004), by Christopher Andersen, there are three references over 23 pages to the young Hillary’s (purported) habit of not shaving her legs; her body odor and penchant for wearing no makeup also get pride of place in the narrative. In Edward Klein’s The Truth About Hillary (2005), the misogyny is laced with a heavy dose of homophobia. “There was a long tradition of lesbianism at Wellesley,” he writes about her alma mater, citing what he seems to think is a damning differential between the marital rates of the Wellesley student body and faculty and the national norm at the dawn of the 20th century. Hillary’s gay friends, “military-barracks vocabulary,” “neglect of personal grooming,” and reported disinclination to shave her underarms (as well as her legs) as an undergraduate are intrinsic to Klein’s weasel-worded indictment that she “was much more interested in lesbianism as a political statement than a sexual practice.” While this line of attack tells us absolutely nothing about Hillary Clinton, it is yet another reminder that the right still regards lesbianism as sinister in an era when most Americans have moved on, including the young voters who reject the GOP precisely because of such antediluvian bigotry.
It’s not just men who peddle a misogynist point of view about Hillary Clinton. Peggy Noonan—a frequent contributor to the Journal’s Whitewater volumes—described her as a “squat and grasping woman” and a “highly credentialed rube.” As Hillary geared up for her Senate run, Noonan poured such observations into an obsessive book-length indictment, The Case Against Hillary Clinton (2000). Along the way, she puts several lengthy imaginary speeches in the former First Lady’s mouth (one of them 16 pages long), including a “free associating” monologue with references to “Howard Stern’s penis” and Joey Buttafuoco. By the 2008 campaign, Noonan was warning that Hillary “may be lethal” like “the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction,” and arguing that she “doesn’t have to prove she’s a man. She has to prove she’s a woman.” She rooted for her to beat Barack Obama because a Clinton candidacy “would be easier” for Republicans: “With her cavalcade of scandals, they’d be delighted to go at her.”
Yes, they would! Democrats can only hope that Noonan appears on as many Washington talk shows as humanly possible in 2016: Her scandalmongering and attacks on Hillary’s sexuality will be the gifts that keep on giving to a Clinton campaign. The talk-show auxiliary, meanwhile, will be in the reliable hands of Rush Limbaugh, who can return to slamming Hillary in the terms he had to deploy against a lower-level target, the Georgetown University law student and women’s-health-care advocate Sandra Fluke, in 2012.
Since the last election, Washington GOP leaders have made a big show of trying to curb the sex talk that drove away those women voters who weren’t already repelled by the party’s wielding of transvaginal probes and its hostility to bills protecting women from violence and unequal pay. “Some of our members just aren’t as sensitive as they ought to be,” said John Boehner last year. The National Republican Congressional Committee has conducted consciousness-raising tutorials in “messaging against women opponents,” but it’s all been to no avail. Wendy Davis, the Texas gubernatorial candidate, has been reviled as “abortion Barbie.” Representative Phil Gingrey of Georgia, defending Todd Akin’s views, told a local chamber of commerce that female rape victims can avoid pregnancy because if they’re “tense and uptight … all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.” Mike Huckabee has chastised women who “cannot control their libido or their reproductive system” for turning to “Uncle Sugar” to provide them with “a prescription each month for birth control.” Chris Christie spent at least $1 million of taxpayers’ money on a report heaping much of the blame for Bridgegate on the emotional “state of mind” of his fired aide, Bridget Anne Kelly, after a ruptured love affair. A new anti-Clinton super-pac for 2016, the Hillary Project, has revived an online game from 2000 that allows you to “virtually slap” her “across the face.”
It’s a measure of how entrenched this ethos has been in the GOP for two decades that not even repeated political defeat can move the party to expunge it. The run of electoral setbacks began with Bill Clinton’s first election in 1992: He won despite the Gennifer Flowers scandal, and he was further aided by backlash to the notorious “family values” Republican convention in Houston where Marilyn Quayle, the wife of the incumbent vice-president, gave a speech in which she argued that “most women do not wish to be liberated from their essential natures as women.” Her husband, Dan, had already attacked the fictional sitcom heroine Murphy Brown, a single working mom, for making an errant “lifestyle choice.”
Once more Clinton sex scandals arrived, the GOP never wavered in its belief that Troopergate, Paula Jones, Willey, Lewinsky, and all the rest would bring the Democrats down. Yet as the Journal kept noting to its shock and amazement, Bill Clinton would “bounce back from the mat” after every presumed knockout blow. He became the first Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to be reelected to a second term and also the only incumbent 20th-century president besides Roosevelt whose party netted House seats (five of them) in a midterm election—and this in 1998, at the height of the impeachment craziness. Clinton further benefited from what the baffled Journal labeled “the Clinton poll paradox”: The hotter the sex scandals got, the higher his poll numbers soared. In a March 1998 Times–CBS News survey, the president’s approval rating reached 73 percent (and Starr’s fell to 11). Yet only a few weeks earlier, when the Lewinsky scandal first broke, the Sunday-morning seers Bill Kristol and George Will had declared the Clinton presidency dead—in Will’s historical wisdom, “deader really than Woodrow Wilson’s was after he had a stroke.” The good news for Democrats is that Kristol, Will, and Noonan—all of whom called the 2012 election wrong too—will still be on hand to declare the next Clinton campaign dead the moment a new round of “bimbo eruptions” is put on the table by Priebus, Drudge, Fox News, the Journal, or anyone else. And the rest will be history repeating itself, yet again.
It’s at this juncture I must add that political predictions are mostly worthless. Let’s not forget, for instance, that a Hillary-versus-Rudy race had been the foregone conclusion in the run-up to 2008. But it’s hard to imagine at this point why, acts of God aside, Hillary Clinton wouldn’t run, or how she could lose. And should any acts of godlessness surface anywhere near the Clinton household, particularly those of the carnal variety, we may well be looking at a landslide.
Photo illustration by Rebecca Rosenberg
