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That quip captured the prevailing view of Clinton’s sex scandal that took hold long before Clinton reversed his emphatic denials of an affair with Lewinsky (in August 1998) and the Senate acquitted him (in February 1999) in an impeachment trial in which the outcome was never in doubt. Jay Leno cracked on The Tonight Show that Clinton was doing so well in the polls that he was already planning his next sex scandal. Within several weeks, however, it became evident that even as the sex scandal was at least briefly an object of prurient obsession for nearly everyone, only for some people-well short of a majority-was it an object of moral indignation and constitutional gravity. In the opening days after the Washington Post and Newsweek broke the news that independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s years-long investigation into Clinton’s financial affairs was now focused on his sexual affairs, there was widespread speculation that a presidential resignation might be days away. What many people don’t remember-and what people who are too young to have followed the story in real time may find inconceivable-is how strange and disturbing and fragile things seemed at the beginning.Īnd they may not perceive what seems clear to many veterans of those days: How much the angry, raucous, media-saturated politics of the Age of Trump has its roots in the angry, raucous media-saturated politics of the Age of Clinton. Lewinsky, which broke publicly on this day 20 years ago-January 21, 1998-was the inspiration for no end of lewd jokes and chortling. Even at the time, the scandal involving Bill Clinton’s illicit relationship with Monica S.