Bill Clinton, In Retrospect

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So, I'm not interested in doing the Trump tu quoque two step regarding Bill Clinton, but I'm really curious about whether people would choose not to vote for him if he were running today in light of his past treatment of women. I mean, I don't think you could really argue that the guy wasn't at least a serial harasser, and while the Lewinsky affair was consensual, the power dynamic would likely be deemed "problematic" by today's feminists, to say nothing of some of the other accusations that are today treated as true until proven otherwise. Again, I'm not playing the deflection game here, but I would be curious if anyone would change their votes in a hypothetical do over of the 1992 elections because they considered Clinton's behavior to be disqualifying for the presidency.

I am 16 and I wasn't alive in 1992.

But if I was Probably for me I would have voted Bush in 1992. This is nothing to do with Bill Clinton's sex scandals however I just think it would have been good in the long term for the Democrats. Bill Clinton's first two years were unproductive and led to the backlash resulting in the Republicans taking congress in 1994 and ultimately destroying much of the welfare system. I think that George Bush getting reelected would have been good in this regard as the Democrats would likely retain control of congress and save these programs.

I wasn't of voting age but I certainly wouldn't vote for him if I knew what I know now about him. I would simply not vote.

I always thought it was just consensual affairs, but it turns out that wasn't the case. So no, I don't like him anymore. I honestly think it was dumb luck that the economy just happened to improve while he was president.

I was never bothered by the Lewinsky affair. It was consensual and it's up to Hillary how she deals with it.

Trump is a different animal. He is driven by his impulses and is unable to control himself. The groping allegations are just the tip of the ice berg, I'm sure. He is not fit for the office of President because he has no discipline.

If I'm not mistaken, Clinton is the last President to have presided over a budget surplus.

I couldn't vote in the 90's, so the entire point is moot to me, but I will say this: Bill Clinton is exceptionally disgusting as well. Any person that uses "power of employment" to make sexual advances is a disgusting person that needs to be locked away with the rest of the sexual predators. Hillary is also disgusting for using her position to try and ruin the women her husband attacked. Obviously with all the attacking and cover ups in this area, the Clinton's are well aware that Bill's behavior is not acceptable, and that's the difference-- Trump thinks things should still operate like this, hence the reason he's open and bragging about it. I'm not enthused about voting for Dracula just to stop Frankenstein, but that's the world we live in.

I agree. Clinton was an absolute sleazeball.

I think Trump is more the Dracula. His evil in intrinsic to him. Clinton would be more of a Werewolf. Frankenstein's monster would be the voters.

I am not really up on Clinton's sex life but I'll assume his accusers are all credible. And, as usual, I'm not American.

It would seriously bother me if he were running today. I would have voted against him in the primaries. It's much worse than any of the specific, verifiable things Hillary has been accused of and certainly worse than anything she's definitely done.

Against Trump or Cruz, I'd not really have a choice. If I lived in a safe state then I'd probably vote for Johnson, just to try to convince the Republicans to drift in that direction. If I lived somewhere important I'd vote for Bill, because I'd rather go for a bad person with acceptable politics (Bill Clinton) than a bad person with bad politics (Trump) or a jerk with bad politics (Cruz). I have reservations about Kasich's politics but he seems a better option than Bill. Rubio or Jeb would give me a real headache.

I can't really comment on 1992 but I think you could extrapolate from what I just said. It would depend on the strength of feeling I had against Bush's policies, as well as pragmatism. I'd rather have a criminal doing the right thing than an angel screwing everything up.

Clinton tended to do sleazy stuff like take an intern into an empty room, and have her give him fellatio.

He definitely had a roving eye,supposedly so did JFK.So you could ask the same question about Kennedy.
I think if either was running for office today that it would be more of an issue for voters.

I wasn't bothered by his relationship with Lewinsky that much. I think there is a problem with sex when there are intrinsic power imbalances between people. Generals and Privates, Partners and Associates, Managers and floor staff, etc. I think that relationship was unethical and gross, but should have been nobody's business but theirs. But Clinton is accused of much worse. If those unproven accusations are true, then he is exactly like Trump and should not have been President.

He was, in other ways, actually a pretty good President. He made some bad decisions and some good ones, but he kept Al Qaeda at bay, in a time when most of the country was unprepared to view them as a threat. On the other hand, his sexual problems are part of the reason why his administration's warnings about Al Qaeda were not taken seriously. People who should have known better and looked harder said his strikes on Al Qaeda were meant to distract people from his personal problems and knowingly said "Wag the Dog" to each other. Morons.

The economy was great then. The challenge at the end of his second term was "What do we do with the budget surplus?" Right-wingers love to distort this fact and lie about it in every conceivable way, but it is true:

http://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-bu ... r-clinton/

That made a huge difference to the strength of the nation, in those days. People don't understand how military procurement works, so they don't recognize that aspects of the Pentagon budget were very well managed under Clinton and were partly responsible for creating the strong military that enabled W and Cheney's incompetent war plans later. In general, I think that was a good thing. It's a tragedy that all that strength was put to such stupid ends.

Yes, but, as Reagan had been the first U.S. president to include the Social Security Administration trust-funds as paper "assets" (to balance his military spending) Clinton had been the first U.S. president to start spending those assets under an "IOU" scheme whereby the federal government could "borrow" the assets. A budget surplus was inevitable but short lived.

And, no, I wouldn't vote for Bill Clinton again. I don't vote for nepotistic dynasties; never have, never will.

Minor technical quibble: While it's true that the accounting magic introduced by Reagan to hide some of his budget excesses inflated the size of Clinton's surpluses, there were real surpluses even without that accounting. A budget surplus was not inevitable (W, for example, could have changed it into a deficit no matter how you count it!)

From the source I linked to earlier:

I probably would have reluctantly voted for him. I'd be uncomfortable with the "New Democrat" turn towards compromising on essential New Deal programs, later shown in his second-term drive towards partial privatization of social security through the "personal lockbox" system. His sleazy personal behavior was evidenced by numerous affair scandals dogging him, and the cattle futures scandal in the '80s looked like pretty clear-cut insider trading even then. Although lest we forget, Poppy Bush had at least one affair of his own which came out a decade later, and being personally implicated in managing the Iran-Contra gun-running to Nicaraguan death squads is a worse scandal than insider trading in my view.

My reason for voting for him basically would be solely to get some reform done on healthcare, the one left-wing policy plank Bill Clinton ran on. Hillarycare's employer-mandate plan was far from ideal, but it was a serious proposal to universalize healthcare. The plan was more universal than the later Obamacare, which was essentially Bob Dole's response to the Clinton health plan, revived from Nixon's response to Ted Kennedy's single-payer proposal.

I might have considered Perot for his anti-NAFTA talk, but ultimately Perot's management of his business was extremely top-down and he had a notoriously strong temper. That's a dangerously authoritarian personality which seems unsuitable for the White House to me.

Thank you.