In the wake of Donald Trump suggesting Bill Clinton is a rapist, Yahoo is running an article by its chief national correspondent Lisa Belkin titled “When Trump made a pass at me. And why it matters.”
“Made a pass?” To many readers, that implies Trump implied a sexual interest. The actual tale is milder than that:
In the early months of 1987, I was a 26-year-old reporter at the New York Times and I went to a party at the newly opened Wollman Rink in Central Park. ... I had interviewed Trump once for an article and was somehow invited to this event, which I attended with my now husband. I introduced him to Trump, we all chatted briefly, and then Bruce went off to get some hot chocolate or somesuch. After he’d walked away, Trump said there would be an even better afterparty and I was welcome to join him, but only if I came alone...
That’s a little smarmy...but compared to Bill Clinton’s antics? A party invitation while the boyfriend is fetching cocoa....next to a rape in a hotel room (Broaddrick)? Or a groping in the Oval Office (Willey)? Or dropping the pants and saying "Kiss it" (Jones)?
This is how Belkin attempts to address the Slick Willie problem in her “why it matters” lecture. She suggests Clinton was “predatory,” and that his behavior is “even less acceptable now”....and yet, her article is still 90 percent devoted to discussing Trump and women, and two dismissive paragraphs on the Clintons:
So is this mashup of mindsets relevant to Trump’s suitability as president? Of course, it is. The argument to the contrary — which comes down to “but everyone from Jack Kennedy to Bill Clinton ‘cherished’ women” — is specious. Yes, other leaders have had problems with women. And yes, that mattered. Perhaps the best evidence of how deeply it mattered — how serial predatory behavior particularly stained the Clinton legacy and his ability to govern — is the fact that Trump keeps bringing it up.
The way he does so — an I’m-rubber-you’re-glue approach to bad behavior around women — has a few weak spots, however. First, two clear wrongs don’t make anything right. Second, Bill Clinton is not running for president. And, finally, times have changed. What Bill Clinton did was clearly unacceptable at the time, but it is even less acceptable now, an ironic legacy of his behavior. Trump clearly recognizes the power of the changed lens and the effectiveness of labeling Hillary Clinton’s actions, which looked like that of a hurt wife back then as “enabling” and “victim blaming” today. Things look different decades later.
What makes Trump’s past actions fair fodder for current debate, therefore, is that he has not changed his lens on himself.
This “Bill Clinton is not running for president” line is something Belkin (and other media liberals) believe is credible....even as they demonstrate outrage that Trump called Rosie O'Donnell fat. That is somehow more objectionable than having an accused rapist as a spouse, applying for First Gentleman. (Last June, Belkin wrote a cutesy article on the potential "First Laddie" without ever raising his misconduct.)
The "ironic legacy of his behavior" here is that feminists have always given Clinton a pass on rape and sexual harassment, even as now they insist it's vile that Trump would hand a woman a bikini and then tell people she looks great in it. The "ironic legacy" is Belkin and her media colleagues have not "changed their lens" on Bill.
In a previous article using a similar tactic titled "How Trump’s ‘bullying’ would play against Clinton," Belkin implied that characterizing Bill Clinton as a predator is strange and irresponsible:
A day or two of news stories and editorial columns followed, in which the focus shifted from Hillary the wronged wife to the Hillary who was willing to stand by her predatory husband.
Which leaves veterans and prognosticators in new territory. “It’s hard to judge Donald Trump on those kinds of things, because he says such strange, somewhat irresponsible things, and it hasn’t seemed to harm him in the primaries thus far,” says Dick Riley, who was Bill Clinton’s secretary of education and who has endorsed his wife.
Belkin can just dismiss Clinton's behavior as adultery, not assault. In a gushy January article titled "Hillary, Lena and Amy: Sisterhood is powerful, or so Clinton hopes," she wrote:
The new willingness to put gender front and center is not without some risks. Clinton’s would-be Republican opponents have been quick to call her changed openness “playing the woman card.” And lately they have gone even further, with accusations that show the double-edged sword of a rapidly changing cultural context. In this changed environment, where sexual misconduct is no longer winked at, Donald Trump (of all people) has accused Hillary Clinton of enabling Bill Clinton’s adulterous affairs
In a previous article, Yahoo went to the pollsters to dismiss Trump's accusations:
“If Hillary thinks she can unleash her husband, with his terrible record of women abuse, while playing the women’s card on me, she’s wrong!” Trump wrote in late December.
Voters, however, do not seem to care. A majority of Americans in the Reuters/Ipsos poll, including 68 percent of Democrats and 50 percent of Republicans, said that Bill’s past sexual misconduct “made no difference” in the current presidential race.
If allegations of rape and sexual harassment against Bill Clinton don’t matter, why would Trump’s past “sexual misconduct” – as Belkin somehow now insists her “pass” in 1987 qualifies as – matter?
