Lewinsky scandal continues to poison politics 25 years later
Quin Hillyer
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If any one day in my lifetime changed America’s politics for the worse, it was 25 years ago on Jan. 17, 1998, when President Bill Clinton first lied under oath about his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky.
The lie set in motion an explosive growth in the tawdriness and viciousness of U.S. politics that has poisoned the civic arena ever since. Also, its spinoff effects put the wrong people in power at the wrong time, with few statesmen-like “adults in charge” to mitigate the scandal’s reverberations.
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From my perch as an editorial writer in Clinton’s home state, where we at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette wrote that the state’s prodigal son made even scandal-plagued former President Warren Harding look saintly by comparison, to the congressional office of my former boss Rep. Bob Livingston (R-LA), who would almost become speaker because of the Lewinsky fallout, the Lewinsky sex account seemed less an unexpected bombshell than a disgusting continuation of a long-running disgrace. The Clinton governorship and the Clinton presidency both were stinking ethical refuse piles that never could be capped.
Nevertheless, while politics for time immemorial have never been for the faint of heart, they remained even five years into the Clinton presidency (and Rep. Newt Gingrich’s fiery counteraction thereto) a realm where certain outer standards would not break, even if they sometimes bent. Alas, the ill will engendered during the 12 months of the Lewinsky saga ripped those standards to shreds.
From the very first days after the scandal erupted, the media and the public largely agreed that the possibility of perjury and obstruction of justice was far more important to the political system than the sex was. But the fact that the illicit affair involved a much younger woman, one actually in the president’s employ, was bad enough that even Hillary Clinton initially said the relationship itself, if true, “would be a very serious offense.” Just 10 years earlier, the very fact of illicit sexcapades killed the front-running presidential campaign of former Sen. Gary Hart (D-CO).
As 1998 wore on, though, a strange inversion occurred. From an original point where a still-large minority of the public thought the affair-with-intern should be enough to force Clinton from office and a 63% majority thought that perjury about it absolutely should make him resign, opinion shifted. Aided by a clever Clinton spin machine and an anti-Republican establishment media, the prevailing view first became that taking sexual advantage of an underling was less objectionable than were any Republican denunciations of it. Then even that morphed into an ethically perverse view that because the subject was sex, the sex actually excused the lies, even under oath.
By early August of that year, only 31% believed Clinton should leave office, even if he lied about it under oath.
Meanwhile, the partisan-cultural divide became an uncrossable canyon. In political Washington before the Lewinsky scandal, the two major parties didn’t like each other politically, but many members and staffers maintained at least semi-friendly personal relationships, along with more than a few cases of grudging respect. The nation was well served by those real bonds, even as tenuous as they might have appeared.
The Lewinsky scandal and the fallout from it snapped those bonds in ways that never have been repaired. This was both because of the raw feelings from the impeachment battle itself and because the grown-ups who were able to bridge the divide were swept away by the scandal’s rip tide.
Livingston, for example, already was in line to become speaker eventually, with an organization in place and the tacit approval of Gingrich, who was expected to hand over the reins in mid-1999 so he could run for president. Fiercely conservative but also an institutionalist, Livingston was well liked on both sides of the aisle and had proved as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee that he could make the system work.
But Livingston’s surprise resignation left a party hack, Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-IL), as speaker, with vast powers in the hands of putative deputy Tom DeLay (R-TX), a political knife fighter who also was embroiled in a string of numerous, ethically dubious financial imbroglios. As an equal and opposite reaction, liberal ultrapartisan Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) rose to leadership on the Democratic side also by virtue of her ability to wield or direct campaign cash, not because of her devotion to Congress’s institutional health.
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A quarter-century later, the only limiting standards of political behavior are whatever one side can punish the other for doing while excusing similar behavior of its own.
What was a stain on Lewinsky’s dress has become a seemingly ineradicable blot on the whole body politic. Clinton lied and statesmanship died.