As people go, Americans are incredibly uptight. We’re puritans and naive. We don’t want to hear bad words on TV or, God forbid, see a stray nipple. We want our politicians to be moral leaders, good Christians, good family men, and corruption free. Before the presidency became a reality show, Americans (and the press) simply ignored their presidents’ personal lives and pecadillos. Call it willful blindness if you like, but nobody was looking. Then came Nixon and Gary Hart and then . . . Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton seemed to have been born for scandal and scandal mongers — what the Clintons called the “vast right wing conspiracy” and “politics of personal destruction”. Although the Clintons bred the 90s culture war and Clinton-hate was probably a central factor in the development of the Christian right (aka the “Moral Majority”), Bill Clinton did play an incredibly important role in positively changing American innocence and how the country viewed its president on a “human” level. Continue reading
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