WSJ: Will Re-airing ‘Right-Wing Conspiracies’ Help Hillary Clinton?

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WSJ: Will Re-airing ‘Right-Wing Conspiracies’ Help Hillary Clinton?

“Now I have, as you’re rightly pointing out, been involved from the receiving side in a lot of these accusations,” she said. “In fact, as you might remember during the ’90s, there were a bunch of them. And all of them turned out to be not true. That was the outcome.”

Appearing on CNN over the weekend, Mr. Clinton suggested the same Republican forces that are focusing attention on his wife’s email practices were trying to derail his 1992 presidential bid by making an issue of the Whitewater real-estate deal in which he had been involved.

“So, all of a sudden something nobody thought was an issue – Whitewater – that turned out never to be an issue – winds up being a $70 million investigation,” Mr. Clinton said in reference to federal probes of the deal that played out during his presidency.

In the spring, James Carville, who helped guide Mr. Clinton’s 1992 campaign, appeared on MSNBC and rattled off a fuller list of Bill Clinton-era controversies, including the dustup over the 1993 firing of White House travel office employees known as “Travelgate;” an uproar in the mid-1990s over White House handling of FBI files, dubbed “Filegate;” and Mr. Clinton’s pardoning of various figures on his last day in office in 2001, known as “Pardongate.”

All were ginned up by “right-wing” forces now determined to sink Mrs. Clinton’s presidential bid, Mr. Carville said.

“Do you remember Whitewater? Do you remember Filegate? Do you remember Travelgate? Do you remember Pardongate? … All of this is just the same cockamamie stuff that we go through,” Mr. Carville said.

For more and more voters, the answer to Mr. Carville’s question is no. They don’t remember Travelgate, or Pardongate or Whitewater. Some weren’t alive when the New York Times wrote the first Whitewater story in 1992.

In 2016, about one-fifth of voters will be between the ages of 18 and 29. That means the oldest would have been in kindergarten when Whitewater emerged as an issue.

I feel old.