Ok, so while making dinner (made-from-scratch tuna-style casserole with chicken, rice, red bell peppers, mushroom, onions, and a cheddar cream sauce**) this memory came up unbidden about a column David Broder, so-called dean of the mainstream media, wrote sometime after the 1988 Democratic National convention. It was about political affairs and their consequences and… and… I’m idly curious whether the particular affair Broder alluded to might explain… well… a ton of stuff that’s still reverberating now.

See. What Broder said then was that right after the convention a very intelligent, charismatic, and ambitious young politician approached him and asked if he though news of a maybe-sort-of-like-Gary-Hart, long-ago affair would be enough to kill his aspirations for higher office. Broder opined that he’d told the politician that in his, well, opinion that if the dalliance was truely in the past, and that the politician was truely remorseful, then no, it surely wouldn’t be a problem.

And, coming from Broder — for some reason hugely influential in the social life of D.C. journalism — that was something like a guarantee it wouldn’t be an issue.

Fast forward four years to the (Bill) Clinton. For various reasons the press was never all that crazy about Bill, and even less so about Hillary — reasons that… sorry… just didn’t make that much sense from most outsider’s perspective… reasons that just seemed to go beyond the usual kind of partisanship.

And then along came revelations about Bill’s liason with Monica Lewinski and it just seemed like the press went dead south on him, again way beyond what either partisanship or even public opinion called for. (Certainly not public opinion — he remained pretty steadily popular, and even won reelection through all that.)

But anyway, as I popped the oven door open to slip in the casserole, and as convection from inside riffled my eyebrows and forehead, the thought popped into my head “Broder was pissed because he’d told Clinton it would be ok as long as he didn’t have another affair!”

So. I dunno. The mainstream press has tended to waive off so many sex scandals over the years with a resignation here, and no resignation there, and but sort of “no hard feelings.” And until the Spitzer resignation I would have said it was more because for whatever the mainstream media just goes easier on Republicans (maybe because it didn’t seem like news to them, maybe because their bosses tell them to keep a lid on it.) But all things considered I think they went kind of easy on Spitzer as well, with him going far harder on himself than anything we knew about in public. (After all Senator Vitters is still sitting pretty in his diaper-fetish seat.)

So no, I think with Broder and, by extension, the rest of “the village”, took Clinton’s infidelity not as a social transgression but as a personal affront: failing to respect a senior MSM pundit’s gracious waiver of “youthful indiscretion.”

Anyway, even back in the 1980s I figured the politician Broder must have had in mind was Clinton because, still as Governor of Arkansas, he’d delivered a (very long-winded) keynote address (or was it the nominating speech?) at the ’88 Democratic convention. And sure enough just four years later he was the one being sworn into office.

Anybody else remember that column? Anybody else have even a slightly firmer grasp on the chain of events? I’m not making anything even like a conspiracy theory out of this — just wondering if the fairly straight-forward connection I drew has any foundation or plausibility at all. Ring any bells?

[** Anyone else still doing recipe Tuesdays? —fl]