Bill Clinton is going to be just fine.
His media tour to promote his novel, The Missing President, has seen a lot of bumps and downward turns. Clinton has caught a lot of flack from Twitter and news media for his tone-deaf remarks on his treatment of Monica Lewinsky as well as his defense of disgraced former Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn.
But the fact that Clinton’s thriller is selling like bananas suggests the anger directed at his #MeToo remarks has been relegated mostly to newsrooms and social media. Put more simply, the public is still eager to pick up what the former president is putting putting down.
The Hollywood Reporter reported in an article, titled “Bill Clinton, James Patterson Novel Sells 250,000 Copies in First Week,” Wednesday:
Mind you, these stunning numbers come after Clinton said earlier that he doesn’t owe Lewinsky, who was just 22-years-old when his White House scapegoated her in a ridiculously salacious sex scandal, a personal apology because he already said “publicly on more than one occasion” that he “was sorry. … The apology was public.”
Clinton said later in reference to the allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against Franken, that, “I think the norms have really changed in terms of what you can do to somebody against their will, how much you can crowd their space, make them miserable at work. You don’t have to physically assault somebody to make them, you know, uncomfortable at work or at home or in their other, just walking around.”
I can see a persona non grata scoring huge book sales with a juicy tell-all autobiography, but not a political thriller. The takeaway here seems to be that the recent criticism aimed at the former president has occurred primarily in a vacuum.
Put more simply, Clinton, who has been accused of rape, is going to be okay. The public isn’t about to turn against him, and it looks like he’ll come out on the other side of the #MeToo movement with little more than a scratch.
