I have to admit that I’ve always felt the Clinton impeachment backfired on the Republicans, but Philippe Reines, a former Hillary Spokesperson, makes a trenchant case that it was not:
The other thing that drives me crazy is this notion that the…Republicans suffered for impeachment in ’98. I’m not sure what that what that means. They lost a couple of Senate seats, but they held the Congress, they held the House in 2006, and they won the presidency in 2000 for eight years, they’re back here with Donald Trump. I would make the argument that the Republicans did a damn good job of poisoning impeachment forever more and that they are benefitting from that right now because all we’re doing is saying, well, it didn’t work out so well for them — for Bill Clinton so we shouldn’t do it again. How, exactly, did it NOT work out so well for them?
He’s right. Sure there were some minor inconveniences. Two of their major hypocrites (Livingston and Newt) had to retire because they’d done exactly what they accused Clinton of doing, and they lost a couple of seats in the midterms just prior to the impeachment trial, but all in all it worked out quite nicely. You could make a strong argument that it was the lingering effects of the impeachment that made the difference in the 2016 election, since they were able to get their actual crook elected by playing on a media enhancedand echo chamber claim that she was a crook. You could make just as strong a case that they won in 2000 because, besides stealing the election, they had persuaded enough people that there was just something wrong with those Democrats because Clinton was such a bad man.
Something to think about, particularly because the Democrats could put on an impeachment trial that would present persuasive evidence that the genius is a traitorous crook. The Republicans weren’t very persuasive during the Clinton trial. They changed no minds. The Senators who vote to acquit Trump might end up having lots of explaining to do.
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