Bill Clinton is playing the victim, but most Americans aren’t buying it.
According to a new Rasmussen poll, a majority of American voters (53%) view former President Bill Clinton as a sexual predator.
Only 24 percent of Americans view Clinton a victim, meanwhile another 24 percent poll undecided.
Clinton in a recent interview on the “Today Show” claimed that he, like Monica Lewinsky, his former intern, was a victim of the sex scandal that led to his impeachment.
"Nobody believes that I got out of that for free,” he told NBC’s Craig Melvin. “I left the White House $16 million in debt.”
He added that he felt he "did the right thing" fighting against his impeachment and that "a lot of the facts have been conveniently omitted."
Oh, how sad. But as Fox News points out, “Monica Lewinsky was a 24-year-old intern. Old enough to know better than to get involved in an obviously wrong relationship with the president of the United States, absolutely. However, there is no comparison. Clinton was 51-year-old, a married man and a father of a young daughter, and he was the president. The burden of keeping it zipped fell on him.
Fox News goes on, “If you’re tempted to feel bad about his $16 million debt – don’t. Clinton is in no danger of turning to a food bank or winding up in a homeless shelter for lack of funds. Since leaving office in 2001, Bill and Hillary Clinton have managed to pull in more than $240 million. So $16 million in legal bills did not throw the Clintons into poverty … [Meanwhile] Lewinsky has struggled to find work, even after earning a master’s degree, and at one point she even moved out of the country to gain some degree of anonymity. One organization even told her it would need a letter of indemnification from the Clintons before it could hire her.”
Lewinsky recently penned an op-ed taking responsibility for her part in the scandal. She also said that she suffered from PTSD from what happened.
When asked during his NBC interview whether he felt he owed Lewinsky a personal apology, Clinton said, point blank, “No, I do not.”
Living in the era of the #MeToo movement, Clinton received a firestorm of criticism for his remarks. He attempted to correct his comments in a follow-up interview with Stephen Colbert, saying that it was “a very painful thing that happened 20 years ago” and that he had already “apologized to my family, to Monica Lewinsky and her family, and to the American people.”
Still, he tried to water the scandal down by saying it happened “so” long ago, as if the time that has passed has rectified his past actions.
According to Rasmussen's findings, most voters (44%) believe Clinton should personally apologize to Lewinsky – not just fall back on the public apology he delivered at the time.
Thirty-four percent (34%) disagree and 22 percent poll undecided.
The Rasmussen survey of 1,000 likely U.S. voters was conducted June 7-10 and has a margin sampling error of three percentage points.