Clinton Revisited
My high school journalism teacher said that there wasn’t any way anyone could have a neutral opinion on the matter of Bill Clinton’s run to impeachment.
Did I possess neutrality? Perhaps. Truth be told, I had a hard time taking any of it seriously. And I had a good sense of the outcome.
Political handicapper Cooke relays this sequence of events: when the firestorm broke wide open in the summer of 1998, Cooke moved the Republican house pick-up to 30 seats– forseeing the oncoming Clinton fatigue backlash. As the summer wore down, he took a closer look at the polls and scratched his head — the backlash didn’t seem to exist. He moved the Republican pick-up down to 10. And, right before the backlash, he shrugged and put the marker at “Zero.”
Clinton is said to have won the 1998 election. The Democratic Party picked up 5 House seats, and held sway in the Senate. Newt Gingrich resigned. His replacement, Livingstone, resigned. The Saturday Night Live sketch had Will Ferrell as Clinton walk up to a podium for a special announcement, and say “I. Am. Bulletproof.”
Predictable. Kind of.
My Contemporary World Problems teacher, (a Democrat) expressed his disdain over Clinton’s original “apology”… not apologetic enough. (He’d later give a new official apology in a church-situation.) I expressed disappointment with the apology as well. It was infuriating. Why did he apologize? I thought he shouldn’t have. We had run into a situation where he had constructed a post-modernist construct where the public knows he’s lying and parcelling out the legalistic words seems a futile mission, but because his opponents are aggravating he’s the one you’re rooting for, where up is down and down is up– what he has his lawyers say is not quite real. Why must an apology be a part of this post-modernist storty-line, where no one believes it but they decide it’s the necessary part of the story?