Michael Wolff

USA TODAY

Does Hillary Clinton have to explain her husband’s sex life to Millennials?

Her campaign’s conceit, of course, is that all that stuff was long ago, compartmentalized by history and no longer relevant to the nearly septuagenarian couple. But a recent poll has voters under 45 in Iowa preferring Bernie Sanders 2-to-1 over Hillary Clinton. The campaign is treating this as a right-left divide and has Clinton trying to tack leftward to adopt Sanders-like positions.

But there is, too, glaringly, the whole Clinton thing, their gestalt, their shtus, their history. If it is no longer a scandal, it quite seems to be an uncomfortable disconnect for younger voters. No longer gossipy and titillating, just inexplicable and gross. Or worse, part of “rape culture.” Clinton’s numbers started to sag in Iowa just after Donald Trump started to wickedly evoke the issue. Now, Clinton’s old accuser, Juanita Broaddrick, is back, with drumbeat attention from BuzzFeed, the Millennial news outfit most of whose reporters were children during the first run of the Clinton sex scandals.

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The Clintons have always approached Bill’s sex life as something they hold their breath about, or deny, or stonewall, or, brilliantly threading the needle, deal with tactically, or, even when it blows up, survive stoically. Indeed, by dint of bravura and fortuitous cultural timing, they’ve miraculously survived what, practically speaking, no other politicians could.

But Bill’s sex life, and the Clintons’ gifts for brazening it out, and, their ever-renewable get-out-of-jail card with the party elite (read white men), may now represent part of a larger schism within the Democratic Party. It’s amoral boomer former yuppies vs. ethical Millennial hipsters.

In current generational modeling, the former suggest the having-it-all narrative, that combination of personal gratification combined with good liberal intentions, and the rationalizations that accommodate both. Theirs was a fight not just to overcome restrictive conservative values, but for personal license. Success justified all. If that is a one-dimensional demographic view, the Clintons, maneuvering around disgrace and turning public service into a personal fortune, continue to give it heightened credence and vividness.

The new generation of Democrats — whom Hillary Clinton is not only a long way from winning over, but whose self-righteous identity, and startling embrace of Sanders, seem in part a response to her ethical quislingness — might appear to be a lot more like the family-values right wing than the polymorphous liberals who gave her husband a pass two decades ago. These new Democrats are virtuous, correct, ever-more doctrinaire, and inclined to lump unreconstructed white men of a certain age into a catchall of reactionary villains whom true believers must reflexively oppose.

Bill Clinton, in the view of this hardcore, is hardly different from Bill Cosby. (Juanita Broaddrick recently noted that Cosby accusers had helped revivify her own cause.)

It is an unforgiving time warp in which liberals of the present moment find themselves with nothing but contempt for liberals even of the recent past, with their sexual histories, attitudes, assumptions and various, unfortunate, passing utterances, the harshest litmus test.

Donald Trump throws a further wrench into this generation gap.

He is, with the Clintons, among the ultimate success-justifies-all self creations. Tellingly, the Clintons have rather made their post-White House fortune among the Trump-friendly real estate and Wall Street set (there is Trump’s damning, and funny, assertion that he paid Hillary to come to his wedding). Bill and Donald have even had something of a shared nightlife. Trump, now, curiously, wears his greasy upward climb with proud insolence, retailing it with swagger and extra dollops of vulgarity, in contrast to the Clintons’ sheepish and unconvincing new look.

And, of course, he’s wily, too. Other Republicans are hard pressed to confront the Clinton sexual legacy. That might well play into Hillary’s sense of victimhood and help her revive the shadow of a right-wing conspiracy ever-popular with her base. Trump, on the other hand, as fellow partier and bad boy with Bill, is not so much highlighting the sex, as the hypocrisy. Worse for the Clintons, he’s implying they’ve been there and done that together. For his base, this plays well — more macho. It’s Putinesqe. For Hillary, Trump’s wink and suggestion that he knows the real score — and likely he does — further divides her from the Democrat’s young and virtuous.

The Clinton view continues to appear to be that her campaign and candidacy have so many things on its side that it will be able to skirt around the Clinton past with policy prescriptions for the Clinton future. Does this change if she loses Iowa and New Hampshire, with Sanders the beneficiary of the anti-Clinton groundswell?

Likely, she will still see the race so stacked in her favor that she’ll not want to gamble. Her pride’s too great, her success too real, to abase herself.

But what if Trump, still standing — still growing — keeps taunting her? How does she explain the Clinton story?

That their long journey, a study in personal realization, full of contradictions and yet consistent in its aims of wanting as much as could be had, is, as the Clintons surely believe, more representative then aberrant, that they are, however messy, and with perhaps a bit more striving, luck and hunger than the average, what forward-thinking people sought to be in the second half of the 20century?

The problem, of course, is that that’s pretty evident. They are what we know them to be. Their vice and virtue, accepted if not applauded by the establishment, is their ability to get away with it, however narrow the escape.

But the paradigm has shifted, and now the new kids want you to acknowledge what you’ve done and pay for it.

Wolff is a USA TODAY media columnist.

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