Our 41st Year
Impeaching the President for lying about sex seemed so bizarre, so shockingly wrong-headed to this author (a retired professor of political sociology) that when the trial began he reset his wakeup alarm: got up before dawn each day in time to record events in the trial in the Senate and note how they seemed to be impacting public opinion, the jury-behind-the-jury of people not unlike himself. Would the poll numbers decline? Would the home folks finally “get it” that what Clinton did with Monica called for the political equivalent of capital punishment? Or would they “get it” that the campaign against him was in bad faith: an effort by religious extremists and others on the far right, on grounds that were both frivolous and contrived, to finally and at long last, “Get Clinton?” Was what Michael Lind has called “the southernization of American politics” a factor? Issues of race and sex, gays, women outside the home (“family values”), resentment of the protest movements of the ’60s and ’70s and the counterculture that grew out of it?