I wonder if Bill Clinton has really ever accepted the blame internally. Publicly, he always seemed in the 1990s to push the blame for things like that on to others with excuses like blaming the women and blaming those who investigated. His own contrition seems to be mostly that he was sad he was in trouble, but he always came back with his perception that he was a good person.
I just used google to get something to back that up and found many articles that spoke of half remembered things. His first admission in August 1998 of the Monica affair to the nation was angry and defiant, followed by a September speech with old and new testament overtones and even a group of three ministers set up by WJC as an "accountability" group. (
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_41_14/ai_55710686) Yet in 2004, he was back to defiant and of course gave that cavalier "because I could" comment as the reason. (Even if true, that reason sounds about as amoral and careless as you can be.)
I had used the words, "Clinton contrition good person" and also got a huge number of June/July 2004 links from his book tour - though there is nothing in what I googled to get there. This shows how prominent that episode was in that very high profile book tour at a point where the Democrats should have been speaking of KERRY and Edwards, not Bill Clinton and especially not Bill and Monica. An interesting link is from the BBC containing the reviews of various newspapers to a BBC interviewer who really did push too hard on the story. The interesting aspects were their characterization of the American press and one little snip of the interview. The view was that the MSM treated WJC as an old friend questioning little in his behavior. Then put it in context that about a month or so later, this same Clinton loving media couldn't be bothered to call the SBVT what they were or to decry purple heart bandaids.
The interesting excerpt:
"For some minutes, Clinton loses his customary cool when he's pressed, too persistently for his taste, on whether he is "penitent" about the affair with the aide. At a calmer point, though, a softish question about his wife and his party's presidential candidate produces at least as curious a response.
Dimbleby asks: "Do you now look to a Kerry victory to restore the domestic policies that you introduced or will we have to wait for a second Clinton presidency, in the form of President Hillary Clinton?"
The Clintonian reply contains a strange modifier. "Well, first of all I support John Kerry. He's a good man, he's a good senator and I believe he'd be quite a good president."
"Quite?" echoes the questioner, prompting a clawback from the former Oxford Rhodes scholar. "Very, very good president. Quite a good president, you don't say that? I think he will, I think he'd be an excellent president."
Hillary gets quite a lot of praise too . . ." (From the Financial Times)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/3829101.stmNow, I didn't have a problem with the "quite", I did think that immediately following the comment to move to the Hillary comment weird. I then thought of how Kerry has recently addressed similar questions on Obama. In that context, a month before the convention - this is not a good passing of the baton at all. Now I would not post this in GD-P because the subtlety would be lost and they would point to Very very good and excellent, but the point is the FT person
heard and saw the interview and thought it off key enough to write these words. Note that WJC does NOT answer the question or speak of anything Kerry would do.