If you write long enough about a great politician, you’re bound to arrive at a moment that feels like a fitting epilogue to the story. I think of Ted Kennedy rallying from brain surgery to deliver one last stirring convention speech in 2008. Or a dying John McCain flashing a defiant thumbs-down in the well of the Senate. Or maybe Rudy Giuliani delivering a last cringey monologue with hair dye streaming down his face.
So it may be when Bill Clinton, slowed and shrunken by age, returns to the Capitol next week to testify in the congressional farce known as the Epstein investigation. The man who introduced himself to the country by denying an affair on 60 Minutes — who as president weathered allegations of coerced blow jobs and sex with an intern — will sit for one last demeaning deposition. Clinton may no longer be the master evader who once lectured his interrogators on the meaning of “is,” but that shouldn’t really matter; the man could be comatose and he’d probably still have enough in the tank to outflank James Comer and these other Republicans, who aren’t exactly knocking down the door of MENSA.
At this point, Clinton has pulled off something rare, if not unheard of, in the annals of the presidency: He’s less liked now than when he left office a quarter century ago. That’s not how this generally works. Richard Nixon was reclaimed in the decades after his humiliating resignation. Ronald Reagan was practically deified. Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, both booted from office after a single failed term, lived long enough to symbolize moral courage, and statesmanship.
Clinton, left office with personal favorability ratings well above 60 percent. It’s notable that the first and most enduring books to be written about his presidency soon after — by two immensely talented colleagues, John Harris and Joe Klein — were called, respectively, The Survivor and The Natural. As rough drafts of history go, that’s a pretty good start. And yet, 25 years later, according to an Economist-YouGov survey conducted last year, only about 44 percent of Americans viewed Clinton favorably.
Leftist contempt for the Clintons has grown louder over the past decade, but it finally came to a public breaking point last month, when nine Democrats on Comer’s committee voted to enforce a subpoena on the former president and send him to jail if he didn’t comply — a mass defection that stunned pretty much everyone in Clinton’s orbit. It wasn’t likely that Democrats on the committee thought Clinton had all that much to answer for. It’s more that they’d like the option to haul Trump in front of the same committee after he leaves office, and shivving Clinton in the ribs no longer seemed like an unreasonable price to pay.
“CLINTON HAS PULLED OFF SOMETHING RARE, IF NOT UNHEARD OF, IN THE ANNALS OF THE PRESIDENCY: HE’S LESS LIKED NOW THAN WHEN HE LEFT OFFICE A QUARTER CENTURY AGO.”
Marriages come apart slowly and for reasons that can be hard to untangle, and the slow-motion divorce of Clinton and the left is no exception. It starts with the fact that the marriage itself was always one of convenience. Democrats forged in the social-justice and labor movements of the 20th century never took Clinton’s “New Democratic” pragmatism seriously as an intellectual argument. They tolerated, just barely, Clinton’s reformist agenda because they saw it as a way to win — something they hadn’t come close to doing for three straight presidential elections before he showed up.
But even Clinton would probably admit that some of his policies didn’t age especially well. As the decades passed, the economic gamble on free trade, Wall Street, and digital startups looked more and more like a losing bet, paid out in staggering inequality and civic unraveling. The reasons for that were complicated and will be long debated, but it’s hard to blame the left for feeling a little betrayed.
And unlike other ex-presidents, Clinton never had the option to just go away and let everybody miss him for a while. He was married to a woman who also wanted to be president and who had more than earned the right to prioritize her own ambitions. For 15 years after leaving office, Bill remained suspended in a kind of long, voiceless purgatory — too visible to be forgotten and yet too sidelined to defend his own legacy. (During the Democratic primaries in 2008, after Clinton personally agreed to sit with me for an interview about his legacy, Hillary’s aides stepped in and quashed it.)
Then, too, there was the general weariness among younger Democrats with all of those boomers who had once made such a big deal about generational change, but who in their old age seemed intent on clinging to power even if they had to be cryogenically frozen to do it. That weariness turned to fury after Joe Biden imploded on a debate stage in Atlanta, but it wasn’t Biden who most embodied for Democrats the specter of their self-involved grandparents — it was always Bill and Hillary.
But even then, with all of the disappointments and disagreements of the last quarter century, it wasn’t anger that caused Democrats in Washington to finally break with Clinton. It wasn’t resentment or fatigue or impatience, either. It was another emotion altogether, too long in rising to the surface: shame.
Because on some level Democrats always knew that accommodating Clinton came at a moral cost. They joked about “bimbos” and the “zipper problem,” but that’s all it was — a joke. They clung to an intellectual contortion that enabled them to separate the public figure from the private man. Clinton, they argued, was a great politician and, at worst, a decent president. That the man they wryly called “the big dog” might also be a reprobate was immaterial, unless you were a prig like Ken Starr.
Then came 2017 and the rise of “#MeToo” — the breaching of a societal dam. Suddenly everyone on the left was drawing a stark difference between your basic promiscuity, on one hand, and the serial exploitation of women on the other. Suddenly, Democrats were telling us that we had to believe the accuser — with or without evidence.
“YEARS OF TORTURED RATIONALIZATION HAD CREATED, A PARTY OF HYPOCRITES.”
In that moment, Democratic leaders and activists reacted with a barrage of sanctimony, rushing to exile politicians like Al Franken, John Conyers, and Andrew Cuomo — all of them swiftly convicted in the court of Twitter. (In Franken’s case, the crime amounted to hugging people the wrong way.) But they must have known, deep down, how incredibly empty all of the self-satisfied posturing rang. It must have occurred to them, during those quiet moments spent binge-watching Rachel Maddow or pounding the treadmill at the House gym, that they had not only abided similar behavior in Clinton for many years, but that they had also made an industry of belittling the women who got in his way. Years of tortured rationalization had created, a party of hypocrites.
It’s this churning guilt, more than anything else, that the sordid Epstein affair has brought to the oily surface. In this case, the worst thing anyone seems to have unearthed about Clinton so far is that he hung around with gross people who fawned over him — not exactly a news flash. But the uproar over Clinton’s connection to Epstein gave Democrats a chance, at long last, to wash themselves clean of uglier stains. Turns out it’s a lot easier to locate your moral courage when the guy you’ve celebrated all of these years is past his prime and politically irrelevant.
That’s fine — nobody owes anybody a lifetime of loyalty in politics. But before Democrats in Washington kick Bill Clinton to the curb like some old pleather recliner, there are two things of which I’d remind them.
The first is that nobody made them stand by Clinton for all of those years, when they knew the complex makeup of the man. Just as nobody made them anoint Hillary as his successor — twice — despite a lack of natural political talent, keeping both Clintons center stage for a decade too long. If Democrats feel like they’ve seen this rerun too many times, it’s because they could never manage to wrench themselves away from the longest-running soap opera in politics.
The second is that, however much Democrats might want to jettison Clinton now, their party might be in a different place had they listened to him from the start.
He was, in many ways, the first president of the 21st century, confronted with tectonic shifts for which no one had much of an answer: industrial collapse, globalization, the silicon chip. And one of the things Clinton kept telling the left then was that you couldn’t just keep defending and adding on to a sprawling, 20th-century government; you had to reform what you’d built. Because if you didn’t, the public would continue to lose faith, and eventually someone would come along to demolish the entire thing.
Clinton probably wasn’t the most virtuous man to occupy the presidency in modern times. But he may well have been the most prescient.
