Politics ain’t beanbag, and oftentimes political actors have very
good reason to stand by problematic actors. If New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez is convicted of the corruption charges for which he’s currently on trial (the jury is deliberating as I write), Republicans will argue that he ought to resign his seat. Democrats will strategically resist this, knowing that if Menendez steps down today, the vacancy will be filled by Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, while if he hangs on until mid-January, the state’s Democratic governor-elect, Phil Murphy, will fill it.
But in the case of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, there were no real policy stakes. Had Clinton left office, Al Gore would have become president and pursued essentially the same policy.
It’s not a coincidence that when
The West Wing did its fictionalized version of the Clinton impeachment drama, it went out of its way to establish Vice President Hoynes as dislikable and ideologically unreliable (“the guy practically has corporate sponsorship,”
Josh Lyman quips at one point before dismissing him as the “Tostitos vice president”), in order to make Bartlett’s effort to cling to office seem sensible and honorable.
Reality provided no such convenient plot contrivance. Gore was a centrist DLC Democrat just like Clinton, one who could easily have stepped into his shoes.
Had Gore become president, perhaps he would have run and won as an incumbent. Or perhaps, as in the real world, he would have lost. Either way, to admit that the Republicans had uncovered something genuinely scandalous would not have entailed making any crucial ideological or policy concessions. It would, instead, have required Democrats to look past knee-jerk partisanship. And, more importantly, it would have required them to acknowledge that what Clinton did was seriously wrong.
Click to expand...