No Regrets

I think Ross must be forgetting the context if he really thinks Democrats would have been better off had they pressured Bill Clinton to resign when Monicagate broke. Recall that Ken Starr was, at the time, engaged in an investigation of the Clintons that had no defined legal scope an unlimited budget, and an indefinite period of time. And he wasn't the only such independent counsel operating at the time. Had that farce been legitimated by Democratic acquiescence in the cynical manipulation of the law to hound Clinton from office, there would have been no end to the investigations of President Gore or into whoever Gore wound up nominating for Vice President.

At the worst, while VP-designate Lieberman was tied up in confirmation hearings new articles of impeachment would have been drawn up against Gore referring to something or other (most likely something related to '96 campaign fundraising) aimed at putting Newt Gingrich in the White House. But even under more likely scenarios, we would have been plunged into an endless nightmare of prosecutions. Recall that the members of congress we perpetrated the inquisition were basically the exact same people who from 2001-2006 sat on their hands and launched not a single serious inquiry into anything the Bush administration did -- from routinized torture to casual lying to congress about Medicaid reforms to destruction of videotaped evidence to politicization of the US Attorneys' offices to corruption in contracting all the rest.

Ultimately, the whole thing was a political matter and the only viable remedy to it was politics. The Democrats stood tall, called bullshit on the Republicans' bullshit, and picked up seats in 1998. Their problems started when people started seeking the ex post facto approval of the Quinn-Broder axis