Where’s the outrage?” cried Bob Dole toward the end of his losing campaign for the presidency in 1996. His words linger on in the American consciousness long after the would-be scandal that prompted them has been forgotten. Didn’t it have something to do with foreign contributions to the Bill Clinton campaign coffers? Anyway, the putative outrages of 1996 didn’t seem like much to go on, outrage-wise, to anybody other than Mr. Dole at the time. And two years later, when the Lewinsky affair broke, Republican outrage was met by a rather more than equal and opposite outrage from Democrats, livid that their president was being impeached over what they regarded as a trivial sexual peccadillo.
Didn’t we all have more important things to worry about?
In hindsight, after more than a quarter of a century, both sides in this outrage-filled tug-of-war appear to have been a bit hysterical. Didn’t we all have more important things to worry about in 1998 than whether our president was fooling around with an intern and, if so, whether or not the deed, or lying about it, amounted to a high crime or misdemeanor? But that’s just it. We sort of didn’t. Have anything more important to worry about, I mean. Things were going pretty well for the country in 1998, and we could afford to pour rivers of ink and devote tons of newsprint to what amounted to little more than celebrity gossip. Or so it seemed.
Way