Monica Lewinsky Is Ancient History
The reemergence of Monica Lewinsky in a forthcoming tell-all in Vanity Fair has pundits wagging their tongues over the potential implications if Hillary Clinton runs for President in 2016. After all, the 24-hour news cycle was born in the feverish atmosphere of the Clinton Wars and it shaped modern politics untold ways. Matt Drudge gained notoriety by reporting that Newsweek had spiked a story on Lewinsky, the powerful liberal activist group MoveOn.Org got its name from an email petition encouraging Congress not to impeach Clinton but simply "move on." But this was all more than a decade and a half ago and the question emerges whether it actually matters or whether the media furor around it is simply because an entire generation of political journalists have found themselves back in safe, familiar territory
An entire generation has passed since the Lewinsky scandal. The 2016 election will take place almost 18 years years after Clinton's impeachment and there will be voters were still in utero during heart of the Lewinsky scandal when the country spent the summer of 1998 debating whether oral sex was actually "sex." The youngest person who able to vote the last time Bill Clinton was on the ballot is almost 36 years-old today and millions of voters will be familar with Lewinsky not from tabloid headlines but as someone mentioned in passing towards the end of their high school history textbooks.
This is not to say that Lewinsky and the Clinton scandals are totally irrelevant. After all, Bill Clinton, who was the 2012 keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention, would likely be omnipresent on the campaign trail if his wife mounts another bid for the Oval Office and the entire history of 1990s ranging back to Whitewater, Travelgate, Vince Foster and a host of other hoary names will have to be covered yet again. This isn't even the first time that the political ghost of Lewinsky has been invoked this year as Rand Paul has mentioned her on several occaisions to condemn what the Kentucky senator views as Bill Clinton's sexual predation and Democratic hypocrisy with the "war on women."
While such condemnations may appeal to parts of the Republican base while outraging diehard Clinton loyalists, to many Americans it comes with a shrug. After all, the political furor around Lewinsky 16 years ago---the same year Google was founded and Titanic won Best Picture--- feels like the distant past to a entire generation of voters. Lewinsky's specter will likely be invoked again and again in the coming years as a Clinton candidacy seems increasingly inevitable; but it likely won't register. After all, most voters look to Buzzfeed, not politicians and the political media for their 90s nostalgia.
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