The leftward drift of the Democratic Party is leaving even Bill and Hillary Clinton behind.
The perennial political power couple — a former president and a former secretary of state who almost became the president — has been a force in the party for more than a quarter-century.
But with left-wing politics getting stronger in the party by the day, it seems Democrats don’t have much interest in defending the Clintons these days.
That was the underlying message of a report published Wednesday by the inside-the-Beltway-Bible Politico, though the writers tried hard to cover it up.
Pegged to the Jan. 21 vote by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to hold former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress for failing to honor a subpoena to discuss their relationship with the late sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, the report highlighted how little use contemporary Democrats in the Capitol have for the couple.
“At this point, they bring nothing but baggage,” one Democratic lobbyist told the publication.
The Clintons’ “continued presence is a barrier to the party’s renewal,” the lobbyist said.
The “baggage” the Clintons bring is considerable, considering Bill Clinton’s well-documented ties to Epstein.
He has long been known to have been present on Epstein’s private plane — infamously dubbed “The Lolita Express” — on numerous occasions. The latest release of Epstein files in Washington has featured him in prominent — embarrassing — positions.
And all of that can only remind Americans old enough to have lived through the Clinton White House years of the constant allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct that trailed Clinton from Little Rock, Arkansas, to Washington, D.C. — the Juanita Broaddrick rape accusation, the Kathleen Willey assault accusation (to name but two), and, of course, the Monica Lewinsky saga with its salacious cigar and stained blue dress.
As for Americans who aren’t old enough to remember that, if they’re Democrats in the nation’s capital these days, many of them have little use for the Clintons, according to Politico.
“The party’s effective abandonment of its longtime standard bearers provides a vivid illustration of how many members are eager to disassociate themselves from the Clinton brand,” Politico reported.
Of course, Politico is as liberal as any establishment media outlet, and the report — with no fewer than four bylined authors — took pains to paint the current Democratic distaste for the Clintons as a contrast to Republican loyalty to President Donald Trump.
So, the implicit idea was that the contemporary Democratic Party is holding its big names to a higher political standard than the GOP, but it’s a weak argument that doesn’t even stand on its own terms.
For one thing, the report complains that the Republican Party, “with a few notable exceptions, continues to rally around President Donald Trump and dismiss any investigations he faces as partisan witch hunts.”
That’s because the years have proven, over and over and over and over again, that the investigations Trump has faced are and always have been partisan witch hunts.
Even more to the point in the current context, Trump has not even been credibly accused of being involved with Epstein’s notorious sex trafficking activities, while Bill Clinton has been literally photographed in Epstein’s company with exactly the kind of young women Epstein victimized.
(That’s “credibly accused,” as opposed to Democrat and progressive fever dreams of Trump someday, some way, behaving like a billionaire Bill Clinton — as in Grammy host Trevor Noah’s idiot “joke” Sunday night.)
That isn’t to say anything has ever proven Clinton was involved in the sexual side of things in Epstein’s orbit, but … this is Bill Clinton we’re talking about, for crying out loud. This is the guy whose impeachment introduced the whole country to a new level of sexual depravity in the late 1990s. Bill Clinton attracts sex scandals the way a strip joint attracts syphilis — it’s just part of who he is.
So what’s left is a more bracing political reality — the Clintons simply aren’t the players they used to be when it comes to Democratic politics. And the party isn’t going to the mat to save them from Oversight Committee James Comer’s questioning.
(Since the committee’s contempt vote, the Clintons, probably seeing the writing on the wall, have agreed to testify about their relationship with Epstein. We’ll see if that actually happens.)
The party is in the hands of an ever-more-aggressive, ever-more-progressive youthful wing that barely remembers that the Clintons helped bring Democrats back to life after a decade of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush had remade the American political landscape.
And the younger generation — like younger generations generally do — thinks it’s just so much better than those old fogies that came before.
“I think it has less to do with Bill and Hillary Clinton themselves and their legacy, and more to do with the way that the party has shifted itself over the last 20 years,” Rep. Maxwell Frost, 28, a Florida Democrat and an Oversight Committee member who voted to hold the former president in contempt, told Politico.
“We want to be more aggressive and find the truth, and it’s less about allegiances to, you know, individuals, and more about what’s best for our party and what’s best for this country.”
Frost might actually believe that, and Politico was no doubt happy to quote it, but that isn’t remotely true. A party that cared about what’s best for the country would not have propped a cadaverous Joe Biden in the White House for four years.
It would not have pretended that an invasion of illegal immigration was anything but an invasion of illegal immigration.
It would not be the fighting Trump every step of the way as he tries to clean up Biden’s mess right now.
The Democratic Party has come a long way since Bill Clinton famously declared during his 1996 State of the Union that “the era of big government is over.”
And all of that long way has been to the political left, thanks to its Barack Obamas and its Nancy Pelosis, and its “squad” members and it “hands up, don’t shoot lies,” and its Black Lives Matter insanity, and its dead-man-walking President Joe Biden, and its diversity, equity, and inclusion obsession, and all the other factors that have pushed it closer to the Marxism of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani than the Bill Clinton “Third Way” presidency.
The real “news” of the Politico report is that, for conservatives, as bad as the Clintons were, the modern incarnation of the Democratic Party is even worse.
The Clintons are out of fashion with the Democrats these days. The least the Democrats — and the liberal media — could do is be honest about why.
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