The Clinton Paradox

PBS is running a 4 hour documentary on Bill Cliton. The biggest problem I have is that it's giving to much attention to the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio as if that were the significant even of his presidency. I never saw the big deal about it. So he fooled around on the side big woop. Consider too that the campaign to impeach Clinton was headed by philandering fakers like Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde, the whole thing was nothing more than a Repub power play.

The real problem with the Clintons is that they were caught in the central misconception of the 90's; that we had reached "The End of History" one of whose corollaries was that politics had entered a "Post Ideological" age where politics would revolve around personalities. Given that mood it was perhaps inevitable that the political discourse would slide into mere tabloid scandal mongering.

We can now see that all this talk about "The End of History" and the "End of Ideology" was utterly wrong. Yet at the same time the 1990's may well be remembered as the last happy time in American History. Is it ironic or merely sad?