“I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” — President Bill Clinton, 1998
“I did not have economic relations with that company.” — Various satirists mocking Mitt Romney, 2012
As happened to President Bill Clinton in 1998, Republican presidential nominee Willard Mitt Romney is learning a tough lesson: legalisms don’t cut it in politics.
During the 1998 Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair, while being deposed in the related Paula Jones lawsuit, Clinton was given a definition of “sexual relations” that appeared to be limited to performing sexual acts upon another person. Clinton was then asked whether, under this definition, he had had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. Since Clinton had not (according to him) performed sexual acts upon Lewinsky, he seemed to have answered the question truthfully by saying “no.” However, Clinton’s semantics did not fly in the political arena and, at least in the short term, Clinton suffered political damage and public humiliation.
Amazingly, Willard Romney and his advisers have not learned Bill Clinton’s lesson. Romney (who, like Clinton, has an Ivy League law degree) and his campaign keep falling back on similar legalisms to try to explain Romney’s various public filings and statements regarding his relationship with Bain Capital, and voters don’t seem to be buying it. The specific issue now is whether Romney left Bain in 1999, 2002, or some time in between. Romney created this issue by saying that all the “bad” things Romney’s Republican primary rivals and the Obama campaign have accused Bain of doing — allowing companies they took over to go bankrupt, firing workers at these companies, and outsourcing many of their jobs overseas — happened after February 1999, when Romney had “left” Bain. It’s stunning that Romney has conceded this framing of Bain’s track record to his opponents. However, even with the limited argument Romney has left himself, documents keep surfacing, including Bain’s own Securities Exchange Commission filings signed by Romney, that conflict with Romney’s narrative.
Faced with increasing pressure to explain his Bain discrepancies, Romney and his campaign surrogates took to the airwaves last week, and the results weren’t pretty. Romney himself trotted out the corporate legal gobbledygook, saying that he “was the owner of an entity which was a management entity. That entity was one which I had ownership of until the time of the retirement program was put in place.” Then his campaign adviser, lobbyist Ed Gillespie, came out with the head-scratching howler that Romney had “retired retroactively to February 1999.” These statements rivaled the best of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, including Clinton’s famous “it depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”
Bill Clinton ultimately survived the Republicans’ overreaching response, which included his impeachment, and did quite well for the remainder of his presidency and afterward. And perhaps Romney can’t offer better explanations on Bain, because the facts contradict at least one of his stories. Thus, it remains to be seen whether Willard Romney, who is just now facing real vetting as a presidential nominee and who could conceivably face criminal troubles over his Bain SEC filings, will be successful in the unforgiving arena of electoral politics.
