David Michael Miller
It’s not so much Monica Lewinsky. It’s more Paula Jones.
Like a lot of Democrats these days, I’ve had reason to revisit my view of Bill Clinton. I had defended Clinton and cast his affairs, including the one with Lewinsky, as a personal issue that had little or nothing to do with what he did as president. I might have found his personal behavior abhorrent, but I also thought it was irrelevant to how he conducted himself in the public realm.
But now, in light of Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby and Matt Lauer and what seems like an endless train of men who have used their positions to assault and intimidate women in less powerful positions, Clinton’s actions don’t seem so benign.
If I were Clinton I would just hunker down in Chappaqua and say my prayers. But the thing about the Clintons is that they are the dumbest brilliant people on the face of the earth. Clinton has written a novel and he decided to go on a book tour. Apparently, he actually believed that he would be allowed to talk about his make-believe world while interviewers would ignore the real world blowing up around him.
Clinton did a series of interviews, most notably one on NBC, in which he seemed unprepared to be asked about the Lewinsky affair. He reacted angrily and said some incredible things, chiefly that the #MeToo movement was “long overdue.” Of course it is, but for Bill Clinton to say that is amazing — because if it had been raging when he was president, well, he wouldn’t have been president.
Still, the reaction among liberals tells a lot about the current state of the left and the Democratic Party. The problem for me is that virtually all the attention has been on Lewinsky. I think more of the attention should be on at least three women who accuse Clinton of doing far worse than using his position to bring about a consensual affair. They are Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick. Jones accuses him of exposing himself to her in a hotel room, Willey says that he groped her and Broaddrick accuses him of rape.
Back in 1996, here’s what James Carville, Clinton’s campaign manager, had to say about women who accused his boss of sexual misconduct: “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find.”
And that’s the problem. Too many Democrats still think that way. All the attention on Lewinsky has to do with the fact that the modern Democratic Party can relate to her — educated, relatively affluent with connections enough to find herself, as a young woman, serving as an intern with direct contact with the president of the United States. But today’s Democrats cannot relate to Jones, Willey and Broaddrick, who actually make far more damaging claims against Clinton, because they are blue-collar people and probably voted for Donald Trump. Jones actually says that she did and appeared at campaign rallies for him.
But that shouldn’t matter. If you’re Paula Jones and you’re telling the truth about Clinton, why on earth wouldn’t you support the man running against his wife, who has stuck with him the whole time while proclaiming her strong feminism?
When liberals start to be as outraged on behalf of folks like Paula Jones as they are about folks like Monica Lewinsky, the Democratic Party will have returned to its roots and be worth supporting again. Until then, the party just continues its advocacy for the affluent and the educated, and who cares about that.
