I was a kid, but in Christian circles there was outrage, albeit exaggerated. Some of it was performative pearl clutching, some of it was church ladies genuinely upset about the oval office being (in their view) defiled. Watching retrospectives, it seems like people were mainly mad about him lying. “Prudes impeached him over a blowjob!” is just a meme.
But there was no widespread Clinton derangement syndrome that I can remember. Not like the wailing and gnashing of teeth over a rich dude paying a porn actress to not tell his wife about their canoodling and then misfiling the receipts or whatever.
Pat is fat and Stormy Daniels would not have sex with him.
I was only becoming a teenager when Clinton burst onto the scene. Most people viewed him as a trailer-trash version of Kennedy, only to find out he didn’t have JFK’s moral fortitude [at least outside of the bedroom]. And Clinton’s greatest “conquest” was said to be Elizabeth Gracen who, while not unattractive, is no Marilyn.
The worst part of Bill has always been Hillary. I suspect he knows it, too. His problem is that without her he never got farther than the Arkansas Attorney General’s office. As time has illustrated, she’s a ghastly combination of personally corrupt, greedy, ambitious and amoral, and there is no lie she won’t tell and no person she won’t step on to touch the reins of power. He was a liar, but on his own his own lies would have been relatively harmless. With her having significant influence over his presidency and her place as a power broker among the democrats, her lies got funneled through him and became his.
The prosecution he underwent wasn’t so much a matter of a moral crusade against a redneck who liked to wet the willy in wells other than Hillary, but about the fact that he and Hillary had told so many lies over so many more significant matters - mostly to try and cover up their own personal greed and corruption - and the Lewinsky situation was the one area they could make it stick.
Don’t under estimate the power that the internet - a very new thing to most people at the time - played. People had more access to information quicker than they ever had, and this was the beginning of people having to address the fact that US political leaders weren’t the shining examples of goodness many - particularly conservatives - believed them to be. Many faulted Clinton personally for it when he just happened to be the guy in office at the time. Not a good President, but not nearly the worst of the post-Eisenhower group. Which, Trump aside, falls under the categories of “lousy”, “bad” and “worse”.
If you care I rate them thus:
Lousy = Reagan, Clinton
Bad = Nixon, Carter
Worse = Johnson, both Bushes, Baraka Hussein Abu Oumama, Pedo Pete
N/A = Ford
