Some are actually preparing for the rehabilitation of disgraced Minnesota Democrat Al Franken, as the Washington Examiner’s Becket Adams recently detailed. But that political rehab risks a nasty resurrection of a particularly nasty sexism. Look to the public pardon of former President Bill Clinton.
When the Left covered for Clinton, the sins of that serial abuser were pardoned because of his past good works. As William Voegeli wrote last February, defending Clinton the politician became entangled with defending the sexual revolution. Bill Clinton was a forward looking progressive champion in the streets so it didn’t matter that he was a patriarchal sexist monster in the sheets—or something like that.
As David Frum wrote in 1998, and Voegeli recently pointed out (I was still learning to spell at the time by the way), the fight over Clinton was actually a fight over sexual morals. What’s at stake, Frum wrote, was “the central dogma of the baby boomers: the belief that sex, so long as it’s consensual, ought never to be subject to moral scrutiny at all.”
That bargain saved Clinton. It also enabled, again Voegeli argues, all sorts of bad behavior. Suddenly carousing wasn’t so bad so long as A) it was consensual and B) one had the right political mores. And occasionally, as Clinton demonstrated, consent wasn’t even a requirement.
Liberals like Sen. Kristen Gillibrand have rightly come around to condemning this bad bargain. Last November, Politico reported that the New York Democrat sent shockwaves through her party by condemning the Clinton standard. Twenty years after the president of the United States took advantage of an impressionable intern, Gillibrand said that was wrong.
Though a bit late, #MeToo started to condemn the bargain that enabled Clinton and perhaps spawned the likes of Harvey Weinstein. Liberals risk reversing that progress and re-upping rude and grotesque sexism if they give Franken a pass now.
No one can argue that Franken was not requisitely woke. Like Clinton, he supported all the right traditional, liberal issues and then some more (abortion, of course, but also gay marriage to name two). And also like Clinton, he didn’t think much of consent. His offenses were less odious but no less demeaning.
Bring Franken back, though, and the lines blur. Suddenly correct political mores will be the only standard. Consent won’t matter so long as there’s plausible deniability. The disgraced Minnesota senator said as much during his farewell speech.
Never mind that everyone saw that photograph of him pretending to fondle a sleeping woman. Also forget her testimony that Franken shoved his tongue down her throat and disregard all the other accusations of groping. On the floor of the Senate, Franken said some of those stories “are simply not true” before adding that “others I remember very differently.”
And that’s enough for EMILY’s List president Stephanie Schriock and former Obama adviser David Axelrod, as Becket pointed out. But let him come back to Congress and the rules will change again, and for the worse.
