Politics & Power Quote by Paul Begala

Begala is laundering a character argument through a rom-com detail: the library meet-cute. It’s an attempt to reframe Bill Clinton’s public identity away from scandal and toward durability, as if the origin story of a marriage can stand in for the messy middle. The “for all of his faults” clause isn’t confession so much as inoculation; it signals sophistication (“I know the criticisms”) while quickly pivoting to a metric he prefers: staying power.

The subtext is tribal and comparative. Begala isn’t really asking you to reassess Clinton in isolation; he’s daring you to measure today’s leadership class against an older template of stability, intimacy, and institutional continuity. “Still married” becomes a proxy for seriousness, for the capacity to sustain commitments under pressure. It’s also a subtle appeal to nostalgia: politics as an era when leaders had long biographies, long relationships, and lives that looked legible to the public.

The context matters: Clinton’s marriage is famously complicated, and Begala’s phrasing (“girl he met in the library”) deliberately softens Hillary Clinton into a sentimental supporting character, smoothing over her own agency and the power dynamics of that partnership. That’s part of why it works rhetorically: it turns a hard, polarizing political marriage into an easily digestible symbol.

The final jab at “the right wing” gives the move its real intent: a culture-war reversal. Conservatives often claim the mantle of family values; Begala is arguing that, on this particular scoreboard, the left’s most scandal-scarred champion can still post a higher number.