To Democrats and even some grudging Republicans, former President Bill Clinton was once the gold standard of political practice – folksy, shrewd, charismatic.
His famous campaign line, “I feel your pain” – first uttered in a testy town-hall exchange in 1992 – came to epitomize his ability to empathize with voters.
Even after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, which led to President Clinton’s 1998 impeachment for lying under oath about his sexual relationship with a White House intern, he remained a much sought-after campaigner for fellow Democrats.
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For former President Bill Clinton, who left office 25 years ago, the impact of the Epstein scandal may only further damage his image, particularly among younger Democrats, amid changing mores around sexual misconduct by powerful men.
But after the #MeToo movement erupted years later, as countless women stepped forward with stories of sexual harassment and abuse at the hands of powerful men, the ex-president came to be seen through a different lens. “No One Wants to Campaign With Bill Clinton Anymore,” declared a 2018 New York Times headline.
On Friday, Mr. Clinton’s closed-door deposition with members of the GOP-led House Oversight Committee on his relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender, dealt another blow to the former president’s image.
Mr. Clinton features prominently in the so-called Epstein files, millions of pages of documents released in recent weeks by the Justice Department, though he has not been accused of wrongdoing. Neither has his wife, former first lady Hillary Clinton, who testified Thursday to the same committee. Mrs. Clinton, a former senator, secretary of state, and Democratic presidential nominee, says she never met Mr. Epstein, who died in 2019.
At press time, Mr. Clinton’s closed-door testimony had just begun. In his opening statement, released on social media, he wrote: “I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong.”
Still, the renewed attention to his onetime association with Mr. Epstein is a reminder of how the former president’s history of marital infidelity – including accusations of sexual assault, which he has denied – has diminished his stature as a political figure today.
What’s more, the fact of Mr. Clinton’s testimony serves to highlight how the Democratic Party itself has evolved in its handling of sexual misconduct among its ranks. As the president fought impeachment, Democrats aggressively defended him, effectively throwing Ms. Lewinsky under the bus.
“I think there is some collective remorse” among Democrats over how they reacted to the Lewinsky scandal, says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
Attitudes began to change, she says, when Ms. Lewinsky broke her silence about Mr. Clinton in a Vanity Fair essay in 2014.
“She talked about the shaming,” says Ms. Walsh. “Here she was, this young woman, an intern. There’s no power differential you can imagine that’s greater.”
Nearly 20 years after news of the affair broke, Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York – who occupies the seat once held by Mrs. Clinton – said she believed Mr. Clinton should have resigned at the time. She also acknowledged that standards for personal conduct in office had changed.
Both Clintons testified this week under subpoena, after weeks of resisting, before the GOP-led committee at a location near their home in Chappaqua, New York. After her testimony Thursday, Mrs. Clinton said to reporters that she told the committee repeatedly that she had never met Mr. Epstein and had no knowledge of his crimes, calling the deposition “political theater.”
On Friday, Mr. Clinton became the first former president in history to appear before a congressional committee under subpoena. In a sworn declaration last month, he said he flew on Mr. Epstein’s private jet in 2002 and 2003 while traveling internationally on Clinton Foundation business. Clinton aides have said he cut ties to the financier before his crimes became public in 2005.
House Oversight Committee Democrats/Reuters
The Clintons, in fact, appear to have been more connected to Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell than to Mr. Epstein. Ms. Maxwell, now serving a 20-year prison sentence for child sex trafficking, helped the former president set up and fund his endeavor known as the Clinton Global Initiative.
Still, images of Mr. Clinton present in the Epstein files are hard to unsee, including a photo of him in a hot tub with an unidentified woman whose face is redacted. The location and date of the photo are undisclosed.
President Donald Trump, another former Epstein associate, is also contending with his thousands of appearances in the Epstein files – and in other reported files that remain undisclosed. Democrats have said President Trump should also be called to testify under oath.
But for Mr. Clinton, another near-octogenarian, who left office 25 years ago, the impact of the Epstein episode centers more on his legacy and on how mores have changed around sexual misconduct by powerful men.
Mr. Clinton’s less-than-robust physical appearance, amid health issues, has only emphasized his image as a man of the past. He won the presidency and governed as a centrist, passing tough-on-crime legislation and welfare reform. In stark contrast to today’s crushing national debt and deficits, Mr. Clinton – working with the Republican House speaker, Newt Gingrich – oversaw budget surpluses for four straight years, 1998 to 2001.
A Rhodes scholar from small-town Arkansas, Mr. Clinton still has his record as a two-term president who governed during a time of peace and prosperity. It’s a large part of his legacy that no one can take away.
But today, after the #MeToo movement and his appearances in the Epstein files, “his voice is diminished, literally and figuratively,” says Barbara Perry, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia.
