What If? Bill Clinton's Impeachment Conviction

Last week I was discussing the current Presidential campaign with a friend. Remarking on Hillary's trust problems among the electorate, I mused about something I had never really explicitly considered before.

Both Al Gore, Bill Clinton's VP, and Clinton's wife, Hillary, have had uphill struggles when trying to leverage their connection with the two-term President into their own stint in the Oval Office.

Let me be clear. While I don't like BIll Clinton, and disagreed with most of his policies, and his perspectives on what was and is good for America, I respect his rare accomplishment of winning two terms as President of the United States. That's more than many accord our current President, George W. Bush, also a man of uncommonly high achievement.

How is it that Clinton's own VP failed to win the White House? And prospects for his wife are similarly clouded as I write this piece.

How would the fortunes of Gore and Hillary, and US and world history have changed, had:

Hillary divorced Bill over Monica's blue dress and his own obstruction of justice and the trail of victimized, openly confessed women with whom Bill had sex over the years as governor and President; and

Gore resigned as VP upon viewing the wealth of evidence that Bill Clinton obstructed justice, using the vast machinery of the Executive branch, to impeded his impeachment and threat of criminal trial?

It's my contention that those two events, especially if they occurred within about six months of each other, would have damaged Bill Clinton's efforts to avoid conviction in his Senate impeachment trial.
If Gore had resigned, perhaps the Republicans, in concert with the Democrats, could have arranged for a Nelson Rockefeller-type VP to be confirmed, who would agree not to run again in 1996. Then both parties' Senators could have safely convicted Bill and ousted him.

I believe that Gore's defeat in 2000 was at least in part due to his defense of an obviously deceitful sitting President. Much in the manner in which voters held Ford's pardon of Nixon against him, and elected Carter in 1976, it's reasonable to assume that a fair number of voters in America's heartland never forgave Gore for defending Clinton.

Had Gore resigned as Clinton's VP for ethical reasons, he could have probably won the 1996 election with ease, had he faced Dole. A convicted Clinton would be out of the running.

Had Clinton still evaded conviction for obstruction of justice, Gore might have given Democrats a better hope of winning the White House than a damaged President abandoned by both his VP and his wife.

The 1996 election would probably have been too early for the current President Bush to have entered, especially with his father having only vacated the White House four years earlier. And it's not certain that Bush could have defeated a sitting President Gore in 2000, unless the bursting of the stock market's tech bubble contributed to a Gore defeat.

Turning to Hillary, her divorce from Bill would have garnered the emotional sympathy of women everywhere, as well as potentially smoothed some of the rougher edges off of her public persona.

Next to the sympathy she'd generate, though, such a move would have helped her answer the constant suspicion that she is purely calculating, including her seemingly unemotional, unloving marriage to her husband.

A Hillary thus softened and playing victim could have more easily followed Gore to the White House.

Would any of this have happened? Who knows. But I think it's quite reasonable to suggest that Gore could have at least followed Bill Clinton, should the latter have managed to evade conviction in his impeachment, and hung onto the Oval Office for another four years.

To me, the moral of this hypothetical scenario would be that both Gore and Hillary might have achieved their ultimate objective, the Presidency, had they 'done the right thing,' rather than sticking by a President so obviously involved with obstructing justice in the case of the probe into his lies regarding his affair and sexual activities with Monica Lewinsky.

By supporting a President who became a laughingstock for attempting to redefine the word "is," I believe both Hillary and Al Gore damaged their own plans to become President as well.

The voting public would almost certainly have trusted both associates of Bill Clinton more had they done the ethical thing and voted with their feet when evidence clearly pointed to his sexual activity with his intern, while he continued to deny it and attempted to obstruct the inquiry about his misuse of power to protect himself.

They are interesting questions to ponder.

By doing the "right thing," both Gore and Hillary may each well have been able to capture the prize that eluded the former, and may still prove unreachable for the latter.