Can they win by bashing Bill?

At present, the Republicans – and especially Donald Trump – are enjoying the effect that their attacks on Bill Clinton have had on the presidential contest.  William McGurn, a onetime speechwriter for George W. Bush, declared from his perch at the Wall Street Journal that the “Big Dog” has once again “been fixed.”  Jonah Goldberg, National Review’s highest-profile writer, admitted that he thought it was “schadenfreudetastic” watching the Clintons and the rest of the Left squirm over Bill’s behavior.  Even the mainstream press acknowledged that the strategy had yielded results.  Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post called the attacks “smart.”  And at the young-adult news site Vox.com, Dylan Matthews addressed the decades’ old rape allegation against the former president soberly, seriously, and as if it mattered to the presidential race.

This is all well and good – especially for Trump.  Still, Republicans should be careful not to make too much of this tactic, particularly as it relates to the upcoming general election campaign.  As Cillizza notes, such attacks on Bill Clinton are wildly popular and extremely effective among Republicans, which is to say among primary voters.  But they are, for obvious reasons, less popular among general election voters, and among Democrats in particular.  More to the point, they are also notably less effective among Democrats, a rather large percentage of whom do not care one whit about Bill Clinton’s behavior.  Indeed, they don’t care one whit about Hillary Clinton’s behavior either.  They care only about electing a Democratic president, and they will thus vote “against” the Republican, regardless of the case made against their party’s nominee.  Edwin Edwards, the former three-term Louisiana Governor, once joked with reporters that the only way he could possibly lose an election would be if he were “caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.”  To a large segment of the today’s Democratic Party even this would not be enough to dissuade them from voting for their party’s nominee.

{mosads}Now, if you think this is an exaggeration, then you need only Google the words “Joy Behar” and “rapist.”  If you do, you’ll find a clip of Behar from the January 5 episode of the ABC TV show “The View.”  In a discussion about Hillary Clinton and the problems she may or may not have defending her husband’s actions, Behar’s co-host Paula Faris mentioned Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, and Juanita Broaddrick: “They say that he either exposed himself to them, raped them or groped them.”  Behar responded, noting that she just doesn’t care.  “Republicans have voted against the Violence Against Women Act,” she started, “now, that to me, is more important than anything that Bill Clinton did or didn’t do….”  She continued, admitting that there is, in fact, nothing that a Democrat could do that would deter her:

Teddy Kennedy. Remember Chappaquiddick? Am I the oldest person in the room? Chappaquiddick.  I mean, a girl drowns and he abandons her and she drowned and women still voted for Teddy Kennedy. Why? Because he voted for women’s rights. That’s why. That’s the bottom line of it in my opinion.

The fact of the matter is that the Republicans have been trying to “get” Bill Clinton for the better part of a quarter century now.  And they have failed time and again.  Part of the reason for this string of failures, of course, is Bill’s unrivaled political genius.  He is, without question, the most talented politician of his generation.  A bigger part of the cause, though, is the fact that the Democrats and their core voters simply don’t operate by the same rules as the Republicans do.  And in 25 years, the Republicans have yet to figure that out.

The Republicans, bless their hearts, still believe that “character” is something a person demonstrates by his or her personal behavior.  It’s measured by what one does, how one does it, and how one’s actions comport with traditional benchmarks.  Democrats, by contrast, tend to believe that what matters is the impact of one’s behavior and effort on the broader, and far more loosely defined, fabric of society.  As Bill Clinton himself once put it in an interview with Tom Brokaw, “I think that you can demonstrate character most effectively by what you fight for and for whom you fight.”

Given this, the Republicans currently delighting in the effect that Bill Clinton’s behavior has had on the campaign, should be forewarned that said effect may be short-lived.  They may think that the former president’s personal actions should disqualify his wife from the presidency, but her base doesn’t care a whit about character as the Republicans define it.  And the sooner the Republicans figure that out, the better prepared they’ll be to run a competitive race this fall.

Soukup is publisher and vice president of The Political Forum, an independent research provider that delivers research and consulting services to the institutional investment community.