ABSTRACT
Less than a week before Christmas, on December 19, 1998, the House of Representatives voted to impeach President William Jefferson Clinton. Of the 228 members who voted to impeach the president for perjuring himself in misrepresenting his adulterous affair before a grand jury, only five were Democrats. Of the 206 members who voted not to impeach, only five were Republicans. As reporters noted again and again, this was really partisan politics. Many analysts interpreted the drive to impeach Bill Clinton as the culmination of an intense political struggle between conservatives and liberals that had begun six years earlier with his election and shaped the politics of the 1990s (which were themselves engendered in the 1960s . . . or, some would argue, in the 1780s). Since this discussion has been occupied with aspects of that struggle, we take time here to look back on “The Clinton Era” and the stories people told when they were following, and thereby creating, its history . . . spanking new American history.
