If you write about a great politician long enough, you inevitably arrive at a moment that feels like a fitting epilogue to the story. I think of Ted Kennedy, who pulled himself together after brain surgery to give a final, rousing party conference speech in 2008. Or a dying John McCain, who voted with a defiant thumbs down in the Senate. Or perhaps Rudy Giuliani delivering one final embarrassing monologue while hair dye dripped down his face.
One last appearance in the Capitol
That could be the case when Bill Clinton, stunted and diminished by age, returns to the Capitol next week to testify in the congressional farce known as the Epstein Inquiry. The man who once introduced himself to the country by denying an affair on “60 Minutes” — who survived allegations of forced oral sex and sex with an intern as president — will face one final humiliating questioning.
Clinton may no longer be the master of evasion who once lectured his interrogators on the meaning of the word “is,” but that shouldn’t really matter; the man could be in a coma and probably still have enough strength to outmaneuver James Comer and those other Republicans who really aren’t beating down the doors of MENSA.
At this point, Clinton has accomplished something rare, though not entirely unheard of, in the annals of the presidency: He is less popular today than he was when he left office a quarter-century ago. That’s not how it normally works. Richard Nixon was vindicated in the decades following his humiliating resignation. Ronald Reagan was almost deified. Jimmy Carter and George HW Bush, both voted out after just one unsuccessful term, lived long enough to embody moral courage and statesmanship.
Declining popularity
Clinton, on the other hand, left office with personal approval ratings of well over 60 percent. (Donald Trump can only dream of that.) What’s remarkable is that the first and most enduring books about his presidency soon afterward — by two extraordinarily talented colleagues of mine, John Harris and Joe Klein — were called “The Survivor” and “The Natural,” respectively. As rough drafts of the story go, this is a pretty good start. And yet, according to an Economist YouGov poll from last year, only about 44 percent of Americans viewed Clinton favorably.
Left-wing contempt for the Clintons has grown louder over the past decade, but it only reached its public tipping point last month, when nine Democrats on Comer’s caucus voted to enforce a subpoena against the former president and send him to prison if he did not cooperate — a mass defection that shocked virtually everyone in Clinton’s orbit. The Democrats on the committee probably didn’t think Clinton had much to answer for.
Rather, they want the option to summon Trump to the same committee after he leaves office, and sticking a knife in Clinton’s ribs no longer seemed an unreasonable price to pay.
A slow divorce
Marriages break down slowly and for reasons that are difficult to untangle, and the slow-motion divorce between Clinton and the left is no exception. It begins with the fact that this marriage was a union of convenience from the start. Democrats, influenced by the social justice and workers’ rights movements of the 20th century, never really took Clinton’s “New Democrat” pragmatism seriously as an intellectual argument. They tolerated, just barely, his reform agenda because they saw it as a path to electoral victory — something they had failed to do in three consecutive presidential elections before his emergence.
But even Clinton would probably admit that some of his policy decisions have not aged particularly well. As the decades passed, the economic gamble of free trade, Wall Street and digital start-ups seemed more and more like a losing bet, paid off in dizzying inequality and social disruption. The reasons for this were complex and will be debated for a long time, but it’s hard to blame the left for feeling a little betrayed.
No leaving the stage
And unlike other former presidents, Clinton never had the opportunity to simply disappear and be missed. He was married to a woman who also wanted to be president and had more than enough reasons to put her own ambitions first. Fifteen years after his departure, Bill remained stuck in a kind of long, voiceless purgatory — too visible to be forgotten, yet too marginalized to defend his own legacy. (During the 2008 Democratic primary, after Clinton personally agreed to give me an interview about his legacy, Hillary’s staff stepped in and stopped it.)
Added to this was a general weariness among younger Democrats with all those boomers who once talked so much about generational change but who, as they grew older, seemed determined to cling to power — even if it meant being cryogenically frozen. That weariness turned to anger after Joe Biden imploded on a debate stage in Atlanta, but it wasn’t Biden who most embodied the bogeyman of self-absorbed grandparents for Democrats — it was always Bill and Hillary.
Shame as a trigger
But even with all the disappointments and differences of the past quarter century, it wasn’t anger that finally caused Democrats in Washington to break with Clinton. It wasn’t resentment or exhaustion or impatience. It was another emotion that had been bubbling under the surface for far too long: shame.
Because at some level, Democrats always knew that accommodating Clinton came at a moral cost. They joked about “bimbos” and the “zipper problem,” but it remained just jokes.
They clung to an intellectual contortion that allowed them to separate the public figure from the private man. Clinton, they argued, was a great politician and, at best, a decent president. The fact that the man they called “the big dog” with a wink was also possibly a libertine is irrelevant – unless you are a moral apostle like Ken Starr.
#MeToo and its consequences
Then came 2017 and the rise of “#MeToo” — the breaking of a social dam. Suddenly the left drew a clear line between mere promiscuity on the one hand and the serial exploitation of women on the other. Suddenly Democrats declared that the accusers should be believed — with or without evidence.
In that moment, Democratic leaders and activists responded with a volley of moral assertiveness, banning politicians like Al Franken, John Conyers and Andrew Cuomo — all quickly condemned in Twitter’s courthouse. (In Franken’s case, the offense was hugging people incorrectly.)
But deep down they must have known how hollow all the self-satisfied posturing sounded. In quiet moments binge-watching Rachel Maddow or on the treadmill in the House gym, they must have realized that not only had they tolerated similar behavior from Clinton for years, but they had also made a veritable industry out of belittling the women who stood in his way. Years of tortured rationalization had ultimately produced a party of hypocrites.
The legacy of the Epstein affair
It is this festering sense of guilt, more than anything else, that has brought the sordid Epstein affair back to the oily surface. In this case, it seems that the worst thing that can be found about Clinton so far is that he surrounded himself with disgusting people who adored him – not really news. But the uproar over Clinton’s connection to Epstein finally gave Democrats a chance to cleanse themselves of darker stains. It’s apparently easier to find moral courage when the man you’ve celebrated all these years has passed his prime and become politically irrelevant.
That’s okay. In politics, no one owes anyone lifelong loyalty. But before Democrats in Washington throw Bill Clinton out the door like an old leatherette chair, I want to remind them of two things.
Two memories
First, no one forced them to stand by Clinton all these years, even though they knew the man’s complex nature. Nor did anyone force her to anoint Hillary as his successor twice — despite a lack of natural political talent — and keep both Clintons in the spotlight for a decade too long. If Democrats feel like they’ve seen this repeat too many times, it’s because they’ve never been able to break away from politics’ longest-running soap opera.
Second, as much as Democrats want to dump Clinton now, their party might be in a different place if they had listened to him from the start.
He was in many ways the first president of the 21st century, confronted with tectonic shifts to which no one had a clear answer: industrial collapse, globalization, the microchip. And one of the things Clinton kept telling the left at the time was that you couldn’t just continue to defend and expand a sprawling 20th-century model of government; you have to reform what has been created. Because otherwise the public will continue to lose trust — and at some point someone will come along to tear the whole thing down.
Clinton was probably not the most virtuous man to hold the presidency in modern times. But perhaps he was the most far-sighted.
