Siege Mentality-How impeachment explains the Clinton campaign

Siege Mentality by Michael Crowley
How impeachment explains the Clinton campaign.
Post Date Wednesday, May 28, 2008


Do you know who I am? I'm the big rubber clown doll you had as a kid, and every time you hit it, it bounces back. That's me--the harder you hit me, the faster I come back up.

Bill Clinton to Newt Gingrich, Winter 1995


The Clintons find themselves victimized and under siege. The presidency is being stolen from them. The press is out to get them. They deride elites and champion the masses. They live in a constant state of emergency. But they will endure any humiliation, ride out any crisis, fight on even when fighting seems hopeless.

That might sound like a fair summary of how Bill and Hillary Clinton have viewed the past five months. But it also happens to describe what, until now, was the greatest ordeal of the Clintons' almost comically turbulent political careers: impeachment. That baroque saga hardened the Clintonian worldview about politics and helps to explain their approach to this brutal campaign season. The Clintons have been here before, you see. They're being impeached all over again.

Even by the time Monica Lewinsky's name surfaced on the Drudge Report in January 1998, Bill and Hillary Clinton were plenty familiar with drastic reversals of fortune. Bill's future seemed ruined when he lost his bid for a second term as Arkansas governor in 1980; he started campaigning almost immediately and was back in office two years later. His 1992 campaign was defined by his "comeback kid" recovery from philandering and draft-dodging crises. After Republicans romped in the 1994 elections, Washington debated Clinton's very relevance.

For a time, it seemed the Lewinsky scandal might have exhausted their deep reservoir of resilience. After Bill--cornered by DNA on that famous Gap dress--confessed in a televised speech that was long on defiance and short on contrition, some Democrats were squirming.

Congressional Democrats were the superdelegates of 1998--worried that the Clintons' campaign to save themselves would extend into the fall, threatening their own political existences. Some in the Senate were on the brink of travelling to the White House to advise the president to resign. But congressional Democrats ultimately rallied, and Hillary played a decisive role in that effort. "I'm the field general of this operation," she told Democratic Representative Jim Moran, according to Washington Post reporter Peter Baker's definitive history of impeachment, The Breach. (Hillary had served as a staff lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate proceedings. Her fluency in impeachment law enabled her to make a powerful case about Republican abuses.) So, if Hillary has believed that she can sway superdelegates in the face of conventional wisdom, it's because she has some experience to justify her self-confidence.

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