California governor Jerry Brown, who dubbed Bill Clinton “the prince of sleaze,” endorsed Hillary Clinton Tuesday ahead of the California primary despite years of denouncing the Clintons’ lack of moral integrity.
During his 1992 presidential run against then-governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton, Brown charged Clinton with “funneling money to his wife’s law firm for state business” – what is now known as the Whitewater scandal. Whitewater sparked a years-long investigation that, when compounded with numerous other scandals, resulted in Clinton’s impeachment.
In response, Clinton fervently denied Brown’s accusation and spun it as sexist, to which Brown fired back that Clinton was “pathetic,” mounting “a Bonnie and Clyde defense,” and “hid[ing] behind his wife.” Hillary Clinton also denied the charges and denounced Brown as “a desperate person.”
“It’s a shame, but it’s the kind of choices we have to make today,” Clinton said in defense of her time as a partner at the Rose law firm. “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas.”
The two also took their “highly personal” sparring to television and radio. When one pro-Brown television advertisement hit “slippery” Clinton for his infidelity and marijuana use, the Arkansas governor called it “the sleaziest ad I think I have ever seen run by anybody, anywhere, anytime since I’ve been in politics.”
During the campaign Brown also called the rumors of Clinton’s extramarital affairs a “character issue,” years before the soon-to-be president’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. He later predicted Clinton’s impeachment, saying in September of 1998 that “it’s not a question of ‘if,’ it’s only a question of ‘when.'”
Brown’s animus did not waver even after Clinton was declared the presumptive Democratic nominee. The former California governor refused to endorse him and instead chose to promote his own platform at the Democratic convention.
Years later in a 1998 interview, Brown again criticized Clinton, this time for ushering in a “confederacy of corruption,” featuring “campaign consultants and lobbyists” into the Democratic party. He shied away from otherwise commenting on Bill Clinton’s “personal morality,” telling CNN’s Crossfire that he did not want to “marginalize” Clinton’s “overwhelming” “policy failures.”
During his second run for California governor in 2010, however, Brown backtracked his disdain for Clinton and expressed regret over a remark he made about the Lewinsky scandal.
“I mean Clinton’s a nice guy, but who ever said he always told the truth?” Brown was shown saying in a video. “You remember, right? There’s that whole story there about did he or didn’t he.”
After the comments made headlines, Brown said that “Bill Clinton was an excellent president,” and added that “it was wrong … to joke about an incident from many years ago, and I’m sorry.”
Clinton chose to endorse Brown’s opponent, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, in the gubernatorial race that year.
