My Political Journey

The Valerie and Joe story, which is rapidly falling to the level of a funny t-shirt slogan --"I sent my husband to Africa and all I got was my name in the newspaper"-- reminds me of some of the more frenzied "sort of but in the end not really that scandalous" stories being reported during the Clinton years. For example, I still don't really get Travelgate or all the hooplah about the furniture Hillary arranged to truck out of the White House at the end.

I never thought Bill Clinton should have been impeached and don't think that it was a good idea for the Republicans to have pushed it as far as they did. The man couldn't run again, he was going to be leaving office anyway. Why put us all through it?

But they did and here we are today with all the pundits fulminating wildly and the politicians demanding Karl Rove be shipped to Gitmo on the next transport or, if they're on the opposite side, insisting Dick Durbin be strapped in next to him.

I voted twice for Bill Clinton. He's the last Democrat I voted for (and I voted Democrat for 20 years!). I defended him for a year to all my friends when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke.

I believed that Gennifer Flowers was telling the truth, I even thought he had probably made a play for Paula Jones. But I also believed that becoming President of the United States with all the awesome responsibility that entails, must necessarily change a man and whatever he had been he was not that kind of man anymore. Because he owed us his very best.

I refused to believe that he would sully the office of the President and when he was finally compelled to admit that he had acted disgracefully and shamed himself in such a tawdry and unnecessary way, I took a long hard look at the Democratic Party and realized I could no longer support it.

This was not just because Bill Clinton had an affair in the White House with a woman young enough to be his daughter, it was also because for a year the Democrats had tried to convince us that he hadn't done it and then tried to convince us that it didn't matter.

Well, it mattered to me. Character does matter. And if you are so bankrupt as a party that you can slice and dice everyone who might suggest otherwise, well then it's time for me to look elsewhere. And in the process of looking elsewhere, I realized that I really didn't agree with the Democrats on much of anything.

More on my political journey later. Next chapter: My core beliefs.