Clinton, Franken, and the Revived ‘One-Free-Grope’ Rule

I was asking an Alabama native a few weeks ago what was going on in his home state with the controversy swirling around Judge Roy Moore and his alleged inclination toward teen girls when he noted that the sexual scandals were spreading all over D.C. Had I heard about Senator Al Franken yet?

“What?” I answered.

During lunch, I read on my tablet how Franken, on a 2006 USO tour to entertain troops in Afghanistan, had kissed and groped another member of that tour, model (now radio broadcaster) Leeann Tweeden, without permission. My prior astonishment that Moore’s campaign was not going into irretrievable freefall gave way to burning anger at Franken. I expected Moore to be two-faced and recalcitrant, the type of person who, throughout the Jim Crow era, would have screamed about the South’s Christian duty not to amalgamate the races even as he was screwing the African-American servant. 

But another consequence, equally predictable, utterly exasperated me: Donald Trump, the Pigpen of American politics, would kick up enough dust to divert attention from his own multiple scandals.

At a time when every effort needed to be focused on exposing him as a colossal fraud—including sexual harassment claims by at least a dozen different women—the President could charge his opponents with hypocrisy. 

Worse still, there was that tell-tale picture of the U.S. Senator from Minnesota, leering at the camera as his hands lurked in the vicinity of the breasts of a sleeping Tweeden.

Subsequent events did nothing to abate my rage. In fact, they only stoked it. It wasn’t only because, as I (and more than a few Americans) guessed correctly, Trump went on Twitter in no time, handing out to his tart Senate opponent the nickname “Franken-stein,” the same way he had dubbed others “Pocahontas” Warren, “Low Energy Jeb” Bush, “Little Marco” Rubio, “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, and “Crooked Hillary” Clinton.

No, even worse was the parade of one Democrat after another minimizing Franken’s misconduct. The party line increasingly has become this: His behavior was inappropriate, even “stupid,” but not criminal or chronic, like Moore’s or Trump’s, in a trope dating back to the 1990s: “Let’s move on.”

Not so fast. Leave aside the issue of whether six accusers (including ones who charge him with roaming hands while he was in office) now constitute "chronic" misbehavior. 

All these contentions may be true to an extent but also beside the point. I’m afraid they also betray an implicit hyper-partisanship that Democrats don’t recognize, part of a tone-deafness so immense that the party will not only lose the midterm and 1920 Presidential elections, but deserve to.

Journalist Bob Collins, reflecting at Minnesota Public Radio's NewsCut blog, expressed it best:

"Here’s what the Democratic Party and the people who speak for it can’t bring themselves to understand: Women are tired of this; they’re tired of all of it. If politicians don’t understand what’s wrong with the daily harassment that women face, they’re not going to give a break to politicians or their party on the basis of 'it could always be worse.'”

A few Democrats, alive to this danger, have called for Franken’s resignation. But the default option has been referral to the Senate Ethics Committee, a move endorsed by Franken himself, who has pledged to cooperate with its investigation.

If you suspect that this is a self-interested action all around, you would be right. 

Both parties on Capitol Hill know that the Ethics Committee is a lumbering beast, with gums instead of teeth. Its deliberations, they believe, will be delayed and protracted enough to allow enough time for them to call for his outright resignation if overwhelming proof of more Franken misconduct emerges—or (certainly in Franken’s case) for prospective voters to get over what the pols regard as their current hissy fit if only a single offense comes to light.

No wonder that George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, in an opinion piece for The Hill, notes: “It is the equivalent to volunteering to be chased by a wild pack of golden retriever puppies. They are likely to catch you but hardly likely to devour you.”

The Clinton Dilemma Again, in a Tougher Time

Liberals find themselves in the same predicament with Franken as with President Clinton nearly two decades ago. Again, they find a misbehaving incumbent whose removal might be irksome but hardly disabling to their agenda. This time, out of power, with a public newly woke to the mistreatment of women, the wind is not at their backs, though.

During the Lewinsky scandal, Democrats could have pushed Clinton to resign in favor of Al Gore, who, going into the 2000 Presidential election, would have inherited his predecessor’s strong economy but without his immense personal baggage. In Franken’s case, the Democrats have in place a Minnesota governor, Mark Dayton, who can appoint a member of their own party to the vacated seat without losing a vote in the Senate. 

But in both instances, Democrats’ love of a figure with show-business quality blinds them to the larger damage done to their “brand” as advocates of the marginalized and mistreated. They write off any attempt to adhere to their principles as, in the words of a fretting Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times, “unilateral disarmament.” 

Kate Harding gave definitive shape to this fear in a Washington Post piece in which she worried that, if Democrats “set this precedent in the interest of demonstrating our party’s solidarity with harassed and abused women, we’re only going to drain the swamp of people who, however flawed, still regularly vote to protect women’s rights and freedoms.”

That is exactly the type of rhetoric Franken counted on when he issued a statement this last week that he regretted that these incidents might make people forget he was a "champion of women." 

Let's just get past the euphemisms from Harding and Franken and reduce their arguments to the basics, shall we? They mean this: Franken and other politicians can grab a woman's breasts, buttocks, or any other body part in reach, as long as they guarantee the right to abortion under any and all circumstances.

The Cost of Rationalizing, Minimizing, and Moral Relativism 

As I have listened to the increasingly frantic rationalizing, minimizing and moral relativism surrounding Franken’s misbehavior, on primary media outlets of “The Resistance” such as MSNBC, I saw the revival of a trope I hadn’t heard in nearly two decades: the “one-grope rule.”

For those of you who may have forgotten—or were too young to live through the tawdry Nineties—the one-grope rule was the term that Debra J. Saunders, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, used to summarize Gloria Steinem’s minimizing of Bill Clinton’s alleged misbehavior toward Kathleen Willey in the Oval Office.

In 1993, Ms. Willey, a Democratic volunteer, had come seeking a job, prompting the President to grope her and push her hand toward his crotch, she claimed in a 60 Minutes interview three years later. Let’s say “for the sake of argument,” Ms. Steinem wrote in a March 1998 op-ed for The New York Times, that this situation had occurred. When Ms. Willey protested, Ms. Steinem wrote, Clinton had stopped, taking “no” for an answer. 

In other words, concluded the founder of a movement that had thrust into the public consciousness a heightened awareness of dangerously sexualized workplaces: “Even if the allegations are true, the President is not guilty of sexual harassment.”

Ms. Steinem did not explain why sexual harassment did not apply to Clinton but did to Clarence Thomas, whose allegedly raunchy interactions with Anita Hill never approached the physical stage that they may well have done with Clinton and Willey—and in an appointive post far less powerful than the Presidency. Nor did she explain why, if Hill was to be believed about incidents that occurred nearly a decade before, the same openness to listening could not have been accorded to Ms. Willey—or, for that matter, to Paula Jones—for actions that occurred in less than half that time.

Simultaneously, journalist Nina Burleigh dispensed with the tortured legal reasoning of Steinem when she infamously told Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz: “I would be happy to give him [Clinton] a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their Presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.” 

Fast forward nearly 20 years later. Non-Alabamians deride voters in that state for choosing an abortion opponent such as Moore, even if this means they might be electing a candidate credibly accused of child molestation. But how does this to-the-last-dog-dies support differ from that offered Clinton by Steinem, Burleigh, and other progressives? How could they expect these voters to take their moral concerns seriously when they had not reciprocated during Clinton’s impeachment crisis—a predicament, let it be stipulated, resulting from his own irresponsibility and callousness?

The media fixation with the Oval Office mess involving “that woman, Ms. Lewinsky” (Clinton’s own term) enabled his defenders to fob the whole thing off as a consensual affair, while other more disturbing incidents faded into the background. Paula Jones could be dismissed as trailer-park trash, while the episodes related to Ms. Willey and Juanita Broaddrick (who accused Clinton of raping her in 1978) could be removed from the public discussion as at best impossible to prove, and at worst the product of gold-digging or women scorned.

In much the same way, the item that definitively proved Senator Franken’s inappropriate behavior—the photo—diverted attention from related activity: the rehearsal for Franken and Tweeden’s USO skit, when, as she recounted last month, “he came at me, put his hand on the back of my head, mashed his lips against mine, and aggressively stuck his tongue in my mouth.”

That rehearsal—or, to use a term that Senator Franken might understand better, foreplay--made a hash of his explanation that the whole thing was “clearly intended to be funny but wasn’t,” with the corollary that he “mock-groped” her—an assertion inadequately challenged on the cable news gabfests.

During one of the debates last year, Trump had Jones, Willey, and Broaddrick take chairs in full view of Mrs. Clinton and the TV cameras. Aside from complaining about Trump's cheap trick, the Democrats carped that this proved that the women were, as they had said 20 years before, tools of the GOP.

Maybe, or maybe not. Ms. Broaddrick had five different people vouch that she had told them about the rape contemporaneously--today, as in 1998, a commonly accepted yardstick for judging an accuser's credibility (one that, as it happens, is now being used tellingly against Judge Moore). Yet the Democratic Party never bothered to listen to her complaint. Why would she not, then, give herself over to people--even a rival political party--that would?

All of that came with a cost. In 2000, Al Gore went down to defeat in his attempt to succeed Clinton. Historically speaking, it's very hard for a party to lose power if the nation is not slogging through either a disastrous war or economic hard times. Yet the GOP base turned out in droves, angered by their most recent loss (the Clinton impeachment) in the culture wars. 

A few years later, despite having to apologize for on-set behavior that he saw as "horseplay" but that others saw as sexual harassment, Arnold Schwarzenegger managed to oust Democratic incumbent Gray Davis. Liberal griping over the star that Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" termed "Der Gropernator" fell on deaf ears for voters who recognized, correctly, that Clinton's breach had gone unpunished.

The New ‘Slut-Shaming’: The Same Old Stupid, Mean and Destructive Behavior

Like Bill Clinton, Franken only ‘fessed up when incontrovertible physical evidence emerged of his misconduct. In Clinton’s case, it was Monica Lewinsky’s stained dress; in Franken’s, it was that photo of him near Ms. Tweeden, part of a CD of images distributed at the end of the tour.

What might have happened if Ms. Tweeden hadn’t released the photo? We can make a good guess from Franken’s second, lengthier statement issued Thursday: He didn’t recall the rehearsal in the same way that she did. 

In other words, even when the whole world could see for itself that he had acted improperly, he still tried to half-heartedly insist that the prelude—what he might have thought of as “foreplay” to the main act—wasn’t what she said. 

It’s a fair assumption that, had he not chosen to pose for and distribute that photo—and had she not chosen to keep it—he’d still be swearing up and down that he’d acted like a perfect gentleman. 

(Recall also that, before that stained dress emerged, Clinton enabler Sidney Blumenthal sent up a trial balloon by his good friend, British journalist Christopher Hitchens, that Lewinsky was "a predatory and unstable stalker.”)

In recent years, this nation has become acutely aware of teenage “slut-shaming” through social media. Mr. Franken’s end-of-tour distribution of the Tweeden photo was every bit as stupid, mean and destructive as such behavior, only it involved—like Clinton again—a fiftysomething, married male rather than a horny adolescent guy on spring break. Somehow, Franken never got the message that being an entertainer, let alone a politician, was hardly a license for delayed juvenile cruelty. 

Ever since the “one-grope rule” was promulgated, the criticism that ensued was written off as a product of conservatism. Nonsense. It is the natural derision that should come to anyone who discards ideals the second they became inconvenient.

Franken Unlucky in His Role Model

Franken can only scratch his head in dismay as he contemplates how Clinton, for many Democrats, remains a so-called “rock star” while he faces the real possibility that, even if his fellow Senators do not move against him, voters might turn him out of office at the next election. Disappointment is the logical consequence when one looks to someone whose particular skills and the zeitgeist of the ‘90s are not transferable to even an eager protégé such as Franken. 

Clearly, the comedian and the President were drawn to each other as early as two decades ago. While Franken was an entertainer with an unscratched need to pontificate and be taken seriously, Clinton was a politician who relished his opportunity to rub shoulders with entertainers and to bask in the spotlight himself. He not only appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show with a sax, but demonstrated an easy familiarity and soft touch with Hollywood and music celebrities that eluded Al Gore, because of his now-estranged wife Tipper’s crusade against misogynistic rap lyrics. 

When it came to be his own time to turn politics into performance art, then, Franken didn’t have far to look.

At the 1996 White House Correspondents Dinner, Franken came out to roast Bill Clinton. The audience wanted to see if the famous wit used on scripts for Saturday Night Live would be unleashed on a President whose faults were just as obvious as his political skills. The sensibilities of the White House were especially tender because the year before, Don Imus had torn into Clinton.

Bill and Hillary need not have feared. Going over a list of subjects he wasn’t allowed to talk about, Franken mentioned one: “I’m not to do any jokes about any aspect of the President’s personal life except his eating habits. Evidently, sir, you eat a lot.”

Clinton guffawed, then relaxed. The comedian had taken note of one of the President’s appetites—for food—while passing over lightly one more obvious but painful for the President and his supporters: his lust.

At SNL, Franken had made his living among a stable of writers and performers who pushed boundaries with Establishment-thumbing skits. But in his remarks on Clinton, he demonstrated that, close to the center of power, he could change in virtually no time. He entered the honorary group of “Friends of Bill.”

In his most recent crisis, however, Franken has demonstrated that he lacked both Clinton’s shameless streak and a spouse who constantly, visibly supported and abetted him. The President could wax indignant for so long that, by the time it was definitively proven that he had lied—not only about Lewinsky, but Gennifer Flowers—people had grown sick of the subject. 

In contrast, Senator Franken’s statements on subsequent accusers who have accused him of fondling their buttocks have been lame and half-hearted rather than brazen.

He has caved, and his enemies smell blood. His first 300-vote-margin victory over incumbent Norm Coleman in 2008, won after a contentious recount, might not have been achieved had his encounter with Ms. Tweeden come to light at the time. 

Don’t think that the Minnesota GOP isn’t smarting over that. And, in the topsy-turvy political environment, don’t be optimistic that the Republicans will turn to a crazy right-winger who can’t possibly be elected. Look at the Oval Office and absorb the harsh lesson taught by the dangers of over-confidence.

The Difference a Few Months Makes

This past summer, the cover of Rolling Stone included the headline, “Al Franken: Hanging With the Senate's The Happy Warrior.” It was the kind of play on words that the cognoscenti love—not just a reference to Franken’s past as a comedian, nor even his present as a soundbite-ready quipster ready to take on the Trump Administration, but a possible future as a nominee of a Democratic coalition in the making, much like Al Smith, originally christened “The Happy Warrior” by Franklin Roosevelt at the 1924 Democratic Convention.

Obviously, everything’s changed. The shimmering vision of the Presidency has been revealed as an illusion, and Franken, post-Tweeden, is one of the grimmest figures on the tense, Trump-shadowed Capitol Hill. 

If he’s ever lucky enough to get a reprint of past and current bestsellers, Franken might see two titles of his titles—the current Al Franken: Giant of the Senate and the past Rush Limbaugh Is a Big, Fat Idiot—crammed into one more alarming one: Al Franken: Giant Big, Fat Idiot pf the Senate.

Here’s some advice, Al: Resign—unless you want Washington, the voters, and everyone you meet to kick you to the curb in the meantime.

(The photo accompanying this post, showing Franken and Bill Clinton in late October 2008, was taken by Calebrw/Wikinews.)