Unfortunately, some enterprising soul already has registered the domain MoveOn.GOP.
I don’t have any strong views on the Michael Cohen testimony per se, but the Republican responses on television and radio have been a blast from the past: From the Clinton-Lewinsky years, especially. You’ll remember that “Move On,” the left-wing activist group, was founded on the belief that the country, then about eight minutes into the scandal, should “move on.”
In 2019, Republicans are revisiting the Democratic rhetoric from that time: “The American people don’t care!” about presidential sexual shenanigans, “It wasn’t illegal!” to pay off the porn star, “Do your jobs!” and ignore the issue, arguments that great men are seldom good men, etc. I heard every one of those tropes on talk radio this afternoon.
Is it true that the American people don’t care?
Was in true in the Clinton years?
The American people did care about President Clinton’s intern bothering — specifically, the Republican people cared, a great deal. Democrats? Not so much. As FiveThirtyEight reminds us, only 16 percent of Republicans believed that the Clinton affair was “a private matter,” while 77 percent of Democrats said so. Some 64 percent of Republicans believed the matter to be a legitimate public issue, and 55 percent said that a president’s marital fidelity was relevant to his fitness for office — while only 16 percent of Democrats agreed with either proposition.
The partisan preferences have flipped in in 2019, to no one’s great surprise. Various persons called Falwell and Graham have become born-again moral latitudinarians. Conversely, Democrats who denounced Kenneth Starr et al. as preening and hypocritical puritans are getting their Chillingsworth on.
Stormy Daniels has published an open letter to Cohen, proclaiming herself proud of him “for finally beginning to tell the truth about” his actions. Daniels led Trump in the credibility polling last summer.
Funny times.
I think Dwight Eisenhower was probably the best president of the modern era, and one of the most admirable as a man, too. He was not, apparently, a pillar of marital fidelity during the war. So, what do we do? Shrug it off? Put an asterisk next to encyclopedia entry?
Or do we just check to see whether he had an “R” or a “D” next to his name, and reverse-engineer our thinking from there?