Talya wrote:
Diamondeye wrote:
That works in Canadian and European politics because the electorate permits it.
The electorate doesn't just
permit it, it
applauds it. Attack dogs going after the irrelevant (and completely legal) personal lives of politicians are viewed... poorly.
That qualifier makes it somewhat hard to compare, since an inherent aspect of the allegations against Clinton was that it was illegal, and therefore not a personal matter - and not illegal on exclusively moral grounds either; at least 2 accusers claimed to have been sexually assaulted.
It's important to remember that just prior to the Clinton administration was Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearing, in which the public was rather abruptly introduced to the concept of sexual harassment - and Thomas had made a rather blatant comparison to lynchings and referenced attacks on "uppity blacks" - and it was directed at Democrats, not at allegedly-racist Republicans.
We'd just been treated to a national shitshow of drama over "sexual harassment" which was apparently a huge issue when a black man dared be conservative and nominated for the Supreme Court - but all of a sudden the left lost interest in when it was aimed at their President rather than a conservative black man who was violating the left's solidarity.
This wasn't mentioned because in the early-mid 1990s the "race card" was only beginning to be recognized as a thing, because we were just reaching the tipping point - the 1964/65 legislation had, at that point, had 25 years of enforcement and racism while racism was mostly stamped out as an institutional force at that point, the left hadn't started down the slope of lunacy leading to today yet; PC was only beginning to be a thing; the abuse of the term "racism" hadn't begun yet, etc.
Therefore, Republicans could not really understand why it was sexual harrassment for Thomas to allegedly make crude remarks (he probably didn't) while it was out-of-bounds to even question Clinton about things he may or may not have done (and at least some of the accusations against Bill are almost certainly bullshit). No one phrased it that way, but it was one of the earliest examples of the left attempting to keep alive the problems of the 1960s after they were essentially solved and then suddenly decided the right wasn't playing fair when they applied the same principles.