How Bill Clinton's resignation would have changed history

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's comment this week that Bill Clinton should have resigned amid the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal has ignited a firestorm of debate within the Democratic Party, and a backlash against the New York senator who now holds Hillary Clinton's former seat and has long-standing ties to the Clintons.

For what it's worth, as someone who voted for Bill Clinton twice, I believed then and today that he should have resigned for the good of the country. His salacious conduct was unbecoming of the president of the United States and a betrayal to voters who twice looked past various allegations of sexual misconduct on his part to elect him to the White House. But most importantly, his resignation would have spared the country a long impeachment battle, lifted the cloud from his presidency, and allowed the country to move forward in confronting its various challenges, not least of which was the growing threat of terrorism.
Regardless of what people think about what Clinton should have done in 1998, it's interesting to speculate how the history of the past 20 years would have been different had he stepped down and not served out the remainder of his second term. We'll never know for sure, but my guess is that the country would have been better off as a result.
Here's a look at some key historical questions to ask about the events that would have followed Clinton's resignation:

• Who would have one the 2000 presidential election? 
• Would the 9/11 terrorist attacks still have happened?
• Would the United States have ultimately gone to war with Iraq?
• Would the 2008 financial crisis have occurred?
• Would Barack Obama and Donald Trump eventually been elected president?

Let's look first at the most obvious question. Would the outcome of the contested 2000 presidential election been different? It's far from guaranteed, but I think it's highly likely that Al Gore would have won the 2000 election running as an incumbent president who had restored a sense of order and normalcy to the White House following the Lewinsky sex scandal. Given the fact he would have almost certainly continued Clinton's core policies, Gore likely would have enjoyed an approval rating similar to the one Clinton had upon leaving office (66 percent). He would have avoided the uncomfortable dilemma of having to run on the Clinton record while distancing himself from Clinton's personal conduct, as he would have had nearly two years to build his own record. Given the razor-thin margin by which he lost the election (a few hundred votes in Florida), I think these factors together would have easily put Gore over the top. There's no way to know for sure what an Al Gore presidency would have brought, but the results most likely would have been better than the disastrous George W. Bush presidency, which included the worst terrorist attack in the nation's history, a misguided war in Iraq, and the beginning of the Great Recession. 

Which brings us to the next big question. Would the 9/11 attacks have unfolded the way they did? My guess is probably they would have, but the chances are at least marginally higher that they would have been foiled had Clinton resigned. For one thing, the year that was consumed with the sex scandal and resulting impeachment battle coincided with the time period when the 9/11 attacks were being planned. If not for the distractions that accompanied Clinton's scandal, the White House and Congress obviously could have focused more centrally on the looming terrorist threat. Of course, there's no guarantee that would have happened (they could have simply shifted their focus to other matters, and battles), but the impeachment drama certainly didn't help in keeping the country focused on what Osama bin Laden was doing in the desert of Afghanistan. Then there's the question of whether a Gore administration would have succeeded in preventing the attacks that a Bush administration failed to. Again, I think it's unlikely, but possible. A Gore presidency would have brought continuity in the fight against terrorism, and there's strong evidence that the new Bush administration didn't view the threat with the same urgency that existed under Clinton. It's hard to argue that the intelligence agencies that failed to prevent the attacks would have acted in a significantly different fashion had Gore occupied the White House, but we'll never know.

One thing that is safe to assume, however, is if Gore had been president during 9/11, there would have been no Iraq War. This was by far the most controversial, and misguided, decision of the Bush presidency. If Gore had been president, as I believe he would have had Clinton resigned, he would have focused on extinguishing bin Laden and his band of terrorists in Afghanistan and not gotten sidetracked in Iraq. 

But what would have become of the Gore presidency had he been elected and the 9/11 attacks still occurred? I think it's likely Gore would have been a one-term president. Of course, much would have depended on how he executed the war against terror and led the nation in the aftermath of 9/11, but he would have faced a stiffer challenge than Bush in maintaining the public's support. He would have received more blame for the attacks than Bush ultimately received as a relatively new president. Gore's critics would have been able to argue that he was part of the administration that had been in power during the years in which Al Qaeda grew as a threat and plotted the attacks, and had failed to take strong enough action to stop it. Bush's supporters could say that he had been president for less than 8 months when the attacks occurred, and that most of the planning for the attacks took place on Clinton's watch. 

So let's say Clinton resigned, Gore became president in 1998, won in 2000, then lost in 2004, likely to Sen. John McCain. That's my best guess on what would have happened in the years following a Clinton resignation. After that, the hypotheticals grow cloudy. How would a President McCain had executed the war against terrorism, assuming 9/11 had occurred? Would a war in Iraq eventually resulted? And would the 2008 financial crisis had played out the same way? Not knowing how Gore's and McCain's economic policies would have differed from Bush's, it's difficult to say, but many of the factors that led to the economic collapse were structural and beyond the relatively limited scope of any actions different presidents, or their administrations, would have taken in the preceding years (Congress likely would have remained in the hands of the Republicans during the majority of this period). So let's say the economic collapse would have occurred regardless of whether Bush, Gore or McCain were president in 2008. It likely would have doomed any re-election prospects for whichever party held the presidency at the time (I'm guessing McCain, but it's possible Gore would have won re-election). So perhaps Barack Obama would have been elected president in 2008 and Trump in 2016 regardless.

But the one wild card in all this is how a Bill Clinton resignation would have affected Hillary Clinton's political career. The fact that Bill was able to prevail in the impeachment battle and serve out his term certainly made it easier for Hillary to run for and win her Senate race in 2000. But would she have run and won even if her husband had resigned? My guess is yes. Voters largely absolved her of any blame during the Lewinsky scandal, and her standing in voters' eyes actually improved as she became a sympathetic figure, and the scandal shifted focus away from her own controversies, specifically the Whitewater ordeal. But while I think she would have run for and won the Senate seat regardless, I think it's much more doubtful she would have been able to mount a presidential campaign. The Democratic Party's views toward the Clintons and the Bill Clinton presidency would have shifted dramatically had he resigned from office in disgrace, and it's highly doubtful that the Clintons would have been able to maintain their powerful position within the party, particularly if Gore had won election in his own right. And if there had been no Hillary Clinton foil for Donald Trump in 2016, the chances are very high his campaign would have crashed and burned. 

So there you have it. Bill Clinton should have resigned in 1998 not only because it was the right thing to do, but because it likely would have spared us the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush, possibly prevented the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq War, and ultimately kept Donald Trump far away from the White House. 

At least that's my best guess. 

How a "Checkers" speech could have saved Clinton

In my previous post, I observed that one of Clinton's fatal mistakes in her campaign was her decision to allow herself to be "Swiftboated" by Trump and and his surrogates, to basically allow them to label her a corrupt, lying crook, without forcefully pushing back against the charges. This created a narrative in the minds of many voters that as dangerous and distasteful as Trump was, Clinton was just as bad.

Lessons from Richard Nixon

Historically speaking, Clinton could have learned a lot from Richard Nixon.
No, not the corrupt Nixon of Watergate infamy, but the then-unknown junior senator of 1952 who saved his political career with the brilliant "Checkers" speech on national television. Picked as Dwight Eisenhower's running mate because of his Cold War, anti-communist activism, Nixon was in danger of being jettisoned from the ticket when questions arose that he was profiting from a political slush fund. Long before his "I'm not a crook" press conference as president 20 years later, a deliberate, poised Nixon went on national television to rebut the charges one by one, culminating the speech with the famous reference to the puppy "Checkers" that had been given to his daughters as a gift, and defiantly saying it would not be going back.

While the Checkers reference became ingrained in political history, it was Nixon's words at the beginning of the speech that were most telling -- both in 1952 and 2016.
 "The usual political thing to do when charges are made against you is to either ignore them or to deny them without giving details."

The price of silence

That, in a nutshell, is exactly what Clinton did in 2016. To the incessant chants of "Lock her Up," she said nothing. To the debate claims that she deleted 33,000 emails to foil an FBI probe, she pivoted back to Trump's taxes. To the allegations that she personally profited from the charitable work of the Clinton Foundation, not a word. To the perception that she told Wall Street bankers one thing and blue-collar workers something different, nothing more than a nuanced allusion to the movie "Lincoln." What Hillary Clinton should have done is what Nixon did in 1952. She should have gone on national television and addressed in painstaking detail every charge that had been leveled at her during the campaign. If she had, I think she would be president-elect today. Instead, she banked on the idea that voters would be more offended by Donald Trump than any questions about her character and integrity. Sadly, she was wrong. 

Pundits and politicians often focus on what not to do when studying Richard Nixon. This is one case where studying a bold action that saved his political career could have saved Hillary Clinton's campaign. 

Making sense of the 2016 election: Trump didn't win, Clinton lost

Like many Americans, I've been struggling to come to grips with what happened in our country on Nov. 8, 2016. The election of Donald Trump has, to quote Michelle Obama, stricken many of us to the core, leaving us with feelings of dread and despair for what the future holds.

But before we can properly assess the future, we need to figure out how we got here, and what it says about us as Americans. I've long fancied myself a history buff, and leading up to the election, I thought that everything I knew about history told me that Donald Trump's election was an impossibility. I was wrong. 

The history of our country is filled with strange paradoxes, some of which lead to devastating consequences, some of which are mere blips in our national story. Time will only tell what the election of Trump portends, but first, how did it happen?

While much of the focus has been on the various cultural and social issues at play (another post), I think we need to start with the dynamics of the Trump-Clinton campaign itself. Some have speculated that the result last Tuesday was the manifestation of a country filled with anger and, yes, more than a little hate, a statement that misogyny still persists in modern-day America to the extent that we preferred to elect a bully and a bigot over the first female major party nominee for president.

But at its core, was it also the simple manifestation of a terribly run campaign on the part of Hillary Clinton? Let's start there, because I think that fundamentally explains why Trump somehow ended up with 290 electoral votes on Tuesday night.

It must be said that Clinton made a series of devastating miscalculations during the course of her campaign, fusing the worst elements of the Dukakis-Gore-Kerry campaigns to the point that she snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

• Like Gore in 2000, she was never able to connect with a vast swath of the American electorate, coming across as an overly scripted, rehearsed elitist, a particularly bad formula in a year in which her opponent appealed directly to the frustrations of working-class whites. She came across as another Dukakis-like technocrat who sold competence over inspiration (remember how well that worked for him). Recent history has not been kind to candidates who lack the ability to rouse intense emotion (whether uplifting or hate-fueled) in the electorate (see Dole, McCain, Kerry, Romney).

• Like Kerry in 2004, she allowed herself to be Swiftboated with lies and half-truths. Although the experts and polls said she won all three debates, I was concerned about her unwillingness to directly address Trump's most over-the-top attacks on her character and record (claims that she destroyed 33,000 emails to thwart an FBI probe, had gotten rich off the Clinton Foundation, was really a shill for Wall Street who told rich bankers one thing and the rest of us something else, even that she had created ISIS!). Her strategy at every turn was to offer a vague denial of it all and then pivot back to Trump's offenses. By doing so, she unwittingly was telling the American people that they should vote for her because she was the lesser of two evils. When confronted with such a choice, Americans will often choose the person they perceive as the agent of change, no matter how distasteful he may be. If she had pushed back forcefully against the attacks on her character, and come clean with the American people on what really happened with the emails, the foundation and the Wall Street speeches, it's likely many Trump voters would have rallied to her side. By largely ignoring the "Lock her Up" chants, she gave them a degree of credibility.
• Finally, she simply spent too much time in the wrong states leading up to Election Day (and never should have taken all those days off the campaign trail to prepare for the debates, which ultimately had a fleeting effect on her poll numbers). She largely ignored the Rust Belt states that ultimately cost her the election (Michigan, Wisconsin and to a lesser degree Pennsylvania), thinking she had them in the bag, and instead traveled endlessly to Florida, North Carolina and Ohio. The Washington Post reported Sunday that Clinton's campaign spent more advertising money  in Omaha, Nebraska, than in Wisconsin and Michigan combined in the weeks leading up to the election! As the Post observed, "strategic decisions can make all the difference in a close election." Clinton's strategy was terrible and spoke of arrogance. In retrospect, it's amazing that she didn't identify Trump's appeal to the working-class whites of these Rust Belt states and do more to try to reassure them that she was more interested in their plight than that of the Wall Street insiders who were paying her those enormous speaking fees. 

In closing, I fear that one of the perils of our society is that we fail to learn from history and often repeat the same mistakes. Unfortunately, that was also the story of Clinton's campaign. As uninspiring as Al Gore was, I thought back in 2000 that he would ultimately prevail thanks to the popularity of his predecessor and the general upward trajectory of the country. I made the same mistake of thinking the same about Clinton this year, though her predecessor wasn't as popular and the economy not as strong as was the case in 2000. Voters have decided in recent elections, though often by slim margins, to choose a risky agent of change over someone perceived as the staid status quo. Like Dukakis in 1988, she tried to make the election about competence rather than inspirational change; like Gore in 2000, she chose careful scripting over spontaneous authenticity; and like Kerry in 2004, she tried to make the election primarily about the dangers of her opponent rather than her own vision. And like all of them, she failed.