We’ll see. It’s nice to read the op-eds about a “reckoning” with Clinton and tweets like this one…

As gross and cynical and hypocrtical as the right's "what about Bill Clinton" stuff is, it's also true that Democrats and the center left are overdue for a real reckoning with the allegations against him. — Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) November 10, 2017

…but the mystery will forever linger how Democrats would have reacted to him vis-a-vis the Weinstein revelations if he were on television again every day as First Gentleman of the United States, not an ex-president whose main job now is showing up to charity events with the Bushes. Would there have been any Weinstein revelations at all during a Hillary Clinton presidency, knowing how they might blow back at her and Bill?

Even the some of the recent liberal columns about Broaddrick, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, and Kathleen Willey are heavy on attacking Republicans and light on Clinton’s actual misdeeds. Philip Klein noticed that about Michelle Goldberg’s “I believe Juanita” op-ed today:

The ratio of this column is 8:1. That is, eight paragraphs of throat clearing, excuse-making, and attacking conservatives to one paragraph supporting the headline. https://t.co/si27AeHU0d — Philip Klein (@philipaklein) November 14, 2017

It's actually pretty amazing to write a column revealing you believe a former president is actually a rapist and have that be the focus. https://t.co/wBqBhnvYH4 — Philip Klein (@philipaklein) November 14, 2017

The Cause comes first, before all else. That’s how liberals got into the business of defending Bill Clinton in the first place and it remains true today. What’s different is Bill’s own disposability to them. He’s aging, his political capital has disappeared due to Hillary’s upset loss, and his centrist wing of the party is in disfavor among leftist intellectuals like Goldberg. Sacrificing him by *now* supporting his accusers is a small price to pay to get the culture to take victims of sexual abuse more seriously and to gain leverage over powerful right-wingers accused of sexual misconduct like Trump and Roy Moore. If and when the day comes that the Kennedys exit politics, maybe Ted Kennedy will get his long-overdue reassessment too.

Don’t count Bill out yet, though. He won’t be doing any cameos at feminist galas in the near future but the sexual-misconduct furor that’s been raging in the press for months won’t last. Stories will still pop up next year but sooner or later a bigger story will knock it back 20 pages in the newspaper. There’ll be a war, an invasion somewhere, a natural disaster, and the public’s attention will shift. And as we creep closer to the midterms, Democrats will face a second reckoning with Bill Clinton, namely that he’s probably still their most effective communicator to working-class southern whites nearly 20 years removed from office. He’ll need to pick his spots until Hurricane Weinstein has weakened but he’ll be back in front of Democratic audiences eventually. Count on it.

One other point. Goldberg spends time in her op-ed lamenting that Republican attacks on Clinton kinda sorta forced Democrats to circle the wagons around him. I wonder if she sees how that goes both ways:

I don't think you can underestimate the degree to which many conservatives have this attitude: (a) we fought a battle over whether character counts, and got our asses handed to us and (b) liberal leaders always circle the wagons around their guys, and ours always cave. https://t.co/XE8sqK58ib — Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) November 14, 2017

If you want to know why many (not all, but many) Republicans and even evangelicals were willing to look the other way at Trump’s sins, it’s because they saw that it works. They watched Democrats rescue an embattled president in the 1990s with a “see no evil” approach so they tried it too. And it worked again! It might have worked for Roy Moore too if not for the fact that his alleged victims were teenagers and he had already alienated so much of the party for political reasons that they were disinclined to do any wagon-circling for him. But not even Moore is done yet. The odds of him serving out Jeff Sessions’s term in the Senate right now are small, but they ain’t zero.

Here’s Broaddrick on Laura Ingraham’s show followed, via Newsbusters, by Jake Tapper acknowledging that Bill Clinton’s accusers have never gotten their due.



