Appearing as a guest on Sunday's PoliticsNation, Daily Beast columnist Jonathan Alter -- a far-left MSNBC political analyst and frequent critic of conservatives -- surprisingly predicted that the Clintons could be more vulnerable on the issue of Juanita Broaddrick's rape charges against Bill Clinton than they were 15 years ago..
Declaring that "reasonable people" are questioning Hillary Clinton's recent comments on the issue, Alter made a logical point that could have been made by the Clintons' strongest critics.
At about 8:44 a.m. ET, after raising the issue of Donald Trump raising Bill Clinton's sexual abuse history, MSNBC host Al Sharpton posed the question:
Jonathan, you know the Clintons, you've written books on the last race and many other things. They had to assume that these issues were going to arise at some point when she decided that she was going to run. Is this, in your opinion, their strategy to really not comment on it till later when there's a nominee or what? I mean, what's the strategy here? I mean, you and I both know Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton did not imagine that this was not going to come up at some point.
Alter began his analysis by recalling the late 1990s history of President Bill Clinton's poll numbers increasing during the Monica Lewinsky scandal:
Right, I think they're comforted by the fact that in 1998, 1999, 2000, when Republicans tried to raise this as an issue, it boomeranged on them and Bill Clinton's numbers actually went up. And Hillary Clinton's numbers went up so much that she walked into the United States Senate in 2000, you know, partly because people thought that this was ridiculous and had no place in our politics.
The MSNBC political analyst then brought up the Broaddrick rape accusation against Bill Clinton and suggested things may have changed in the last decade that make the Clintons more vulnerable on the issue:
But, having said that, some things have changed in the conversation over feminism and assault -- sexual assault -- has changed in the last 15 years. So when Hillary tweeted not too long ago that she believed the woman in any "he said, she said" situation involving sexual assault, you now have a situation where people are going, you know, reasonable people are going, "All right, well, if you've always believed the woman, then why not believe Juanita Broaddrick, who claims that Bill Clinton sexually assaulted her in 1978?"
Alter concluded:
And she says, "Well, there's no evidence of it." Well, often there's no evidence. So they could get into one of these discussions about sexual assault that would not be helpful for their campaign.
