Bill Clinton was not a great guy. By Matthew Yglesias

And neither is Donald Trump

Matthew Yglesias

12 July 2023

∙ Paid

www.slowboring.com

11 - 14 minutes

I thought the most interesting responses to my June 13 column “The Orange Man is Bad” were those that asked some variation of the question “what about Bill Clinton?”

It’s an interesting response because, depending on exactly how it’s meant, the point is either a very good one or a very bad one.

That conservatives’ decision to stand behind a not-so-great guy is psychologically comprehensible and non-unique is, I think, a great point. Present-day American conservatives are human beings, and the kinds of cognitive errors they make are human errors that, in different times and under different circumstances, have been made by many different people. And given the political shifts the country has experienced, I bet there are actually a lot of people who voted for Ross Perot in 1992, Bill Clinton in 1996, and Donald Trump in 2016.

I also think “what about Bill Clinton?” is a shrewd move if you see yourself as Donald Trump’s Discourse Lawyer. Many prominent Democratic Party politicians — including Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Hillary Clinton — played high-profile roles in American politics in 1998-1999 and are on record doing apologetics for Clinton. So if you call those people out, they need to get defensive and start drawing distinctions. And while the distinctions are real, the need to backtrack takes the sting out of their anti-Trump punches. It’s a good move and yet another example of why Democrats would be better served by a fresh crop of leaders.

But I would really not recommend spending one’s time serving as an unpaid Discourse Lawyer for prominent politicians. That’s the whole point here — that Trump has persuaded so many conservatives to react to the exposure of his wrongdoings by asking “what about this other guy?” is a sign of his power as a confident man. Bill Clinton pulled off something similar when his affair with Monica Lewinsky was revealed, which underscored his skills as a charismatic leader. But that was bad! It would have been better for the country if he’d resigned like a man of honor, or somehow been forced from office by more resilient party leaders. It is a frailty of the American system that this is difficult to do in practice. But Trump is not, currently, in office, and Republicans actually do have the option of selecting a non-scumbag as their leader. Which they should, because their points about Bill Clinton are broadly correct.

I have a strong recollection of a gathering of my mother’s side of the family at either Thanksgiving or Passover sometime at the height of the Lewinsky drama.

And my Aunt Lisa, almost like a time traveler from the future, said that everyone was letting their dislike of Ken Starr and Newt Gingrich cloud their vision. That if in some other context, it turned out that the boss of a large organization was having an affair with a much-younger intern, all these liberals around the table would be saying that was seriously wrong. That Clinton losing power wouldn’t be a Republican Party coup, it would just put Al Gore in office. And that she didn’t understand why everyone was being so weird about this.

In retrospect, that was completely correct. But at the time, nobody in the family agreed with her — we were all good Discourse Lawyers ourselves:

    The entire Whitewater investigation was a sham and a political witch hunt.

    There was no official misconduct involved or actual complaint from Lewinsky.

    Clinton’s social conservative accusers had no standing to level any kind of feminist complaint against Clinton.

    The Supreme Court decision allowing Paula Jones’ lawsuit to go forward was clearly a mistake.

    The GOP caucus itself was full of cheaters and cretins. 

I will say for my own part, as a teenager, I fancied it mature and sophisticated to think of Clinton surviving this sex scandal as an example of the American people becoming more mature and sophisticated. We all knew about François Mitterrand’s widow formally inviting his mistress and their daughter to the late president’s funeral. Of course, now I’m middle-aged and I understand how absurd it was for a teenager to have strong opinions about which attitudes are mature and sophisticated.

More broadly, it just seems obvious that Aunt Lisa was right all along and that if this same pattern of conduct had come to light in a different context, everyone would think that it was pretty bad. More to the point, if Clinton had been more a man of honor who apologized to the nation and said he was going to step down for the good of the country, the good of the party, and the good of his family, almost everyone would have deemed that a sound course of action. Clinton succeeded at exactly what Trump has succeeded at — getting everyone to focus on the fact that his misconduct had been revealed by his enemies, who were people that my family (rightly) didn’t like, and therefore were our enemies, too, so we had to champion his cause. That’s politics for you, but it leads to bad judgment.

One way in which the Clinton and Trump situations distinguish themselves is that Clinton was a genuinely very effective politician who maintained strong approval ratings throughout his second term. Judged very narrowly, the view that you’d be giving something up by swapping him out in favor of Al Gore did make sense.

That being said, the list of downstream consequences for the Democratic Party is not great:

    Clinton was term-limited, so the swap for the less-charismatic Gore happened anyway.

    Despite Democrats’ strong performance in the 1998 midterms, some of the sleaze does seem to have hit the party short-term — at a minimum, George W. Bush milked the hell out of his line about “restoring honor and dignity to the White House” in the 2000 election.

    It certainly seems like the otherwise very eccentric decision to clear the field for Hillary Clinton to win the nomination for Senate in New York was a consequence of how critical her decision to stand by Bill was to the politics of 1998. 

One can spin this out in a variety of ways. To be maximalist about it, one could assert that Gore as incumbent would have won in 2000, and with more continuity of government there would have been more focus on al-Qaeda in 2001, and perhaps the 9/11 plot would even have been foiled. Without Charlie Rangel clearing the field for Hillary in the New York Senate race, probably Carl McCall gets that seat and Democrats avoid the brutal 2002 gubernatorial primary that threw the governor’s mansion to George Pataki.

What happens from there? Who knows. But I do think we know that Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions didn’t work out well — not just in the sense that she lost, but also in the sense that in pursuit of those ambitions, she did things like vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, something I think Senator McCall likely wouldn’t have done.

And now 25 years later, if Democrats wanted to make hay out of Republican scandal and they said “what about Bill Clinton?” older Dems like Biden could say “I liked him a lot, he was a really smart politician and he saved abortion rights and we had a dynamite economy, but he fucked up and that’s why he got bounced — it’s too bad to see that kind of talent squandered.” The whole bargain between the Clinton family and the Democratic Party ultimately didn’t work out, and arguably party leaders’ savviest moment came in 2008 when Harry Reid and Pelosi urged Barack Obama into the race. It was hard for party leaders to tacitly coordinate against a prohibitive favorite like that, and the difficulty of pulling off collective acts of party leadership seems to me like a big flaw in our system.

It’s hard to know what’s in people’s heads. But here’s an interesting thought experiment. Suppose there was a secret ballot whereby every GOP member of Congress and statewide elected official got to vote on whether Trump should run for president in 2024 or announce his decision to retire from politics. It’s guaranteed that if “retire” wins, he will politely step aside. How many votes would “retire” get? It’s impossible to know for sure, but my strong sense is it would be a majority.

By the same token, if you’d held a similar vote when the Lewinsky scandal first broke, I bet most Democratic electeds would have voted for Clinton to step down for the good of the country.

There’s no political system I’m aware of in which leadership choices work in exactly that way. But there are plenty of systems that at least come somewhat closer. The idea in parliamentary systems is often that the party leader is, in effect, hired by the MPs to put a popular face on the caucus. Since the leader is typically a charismatic and effective politician, he or she gets a lot of deference from the rank and file. But if the leader becomes embarrassing, that leader gets dropped.

In coalition dynamics, there’s a layer of something similar. The junior partners in the coalition agree to support a government that they believe advances their interests. But the FDP in Germany doesn’t owe any personal allegiance at all to Olaf Scholz. If he gets rocked by scandal, they’d be well within their rights to demand he step down or they will break the coalition.

In terms of legislative powers, the American presidency is a weaker office than a typical parliamentary head of government. But the president is in a much stronger position vis-à-vis his fellow party leaders. He is not the hired agent of the congressional caucus. What’s more, while I think traditional American political thought holds that people are supposed to feel “closer” to lower-level elected officials with fewer constituents, in today’s world it doesn’t work that way. The president is on television frequently, thus serving as an imaginary friend (or enemy) to most people, while the vast majority of members of Congress languish in obscurity, even in the eyes of their own voters.

This means that for the most part, the job of a good member of Congress is to support the leader of the team. The question of whether the person who is leading is good for the team — to say nothing of the country — barely arises.

I doubt GOP primary voters care what I think.

But on the off chance that they do, I really want to say that I empathize with the situation you find yourself in. It’s maybe not as unique as your harshest critics like to say. I would just urge you to remember that getting mad at Trump critics on the grounds that you think their criticisms are maybe a little hypocritical or a little overstated or a little selective is not you getting one over on the libs, it’s Trump getting one over on you. The right question to ask about Clinton and Lewinsky wasn’t “are House Republicans entirely on the level?” or “does it really make sense to punish one of our guys for this when Reagan got away with Iran-Contra?” The right question was “do I think this is good? Is this the kind of leadership I want the party to have?”

To empathize with the Democrats of 1998, part of the problem is that there was no procedural mechanism through which to render that verdict that didn’t involve jumping on a GOP-led process. The same was true for Republicans during Trump’s first impeachment.

But that’s the whole point of a primary campaign. The issue now isn’t “will you unite with the cringiest resist libs on the planet to help defeat Trump?” It’s “what do you want the leadership of your party to look like?” If it ends up being Trump, 95% of you will find yourselves doing apologetics for whatever past wrongs come to light and whatever future wrongs he commits. Is that a situation you want to be in?