Politics & Power Quote by Rahm Emanuel

Emanuel is doing a kind of late-90s damage audit: not relitigating the facts so much as re-centering the story. By calling the Lewinsky investigation "way off" from Whitewater's original focus, he frames the scandal era as a bait-and-switch engineered by adversaries and enabled by the media ecosystem that rewarded salacious drift. The line "which turned out to be nothing" isn’t just a verdict on Whitewater; it’s a political argument that the process was the punishment, that investigation itself became a governing strategy.

The more revealing clause is "determined as political opponents to not allow his presidency to succeed". Emanuel isn’t claiming mere partisan disagreement; he’s alleging a sabotage mindset, a willingness to treat legitimacy as optional and scandal as a tool of attrition. It recasts impeachment not as moral reckoning but as power politics by other means. Coming from Emanuel - a hard-edged operator with a famously transactional view of Washington - the intent is less sentimental defense of Clinton than a warning about incentives: if you can’t beat a president on policy, you can drown him in procedural quicksand.

Context matters: post-Watergate norms made investigative oversight sacred, but the 1990s turned it into a televised sport. Emanuel’s phrasing quietly absolves Clinton’s personal recklessness by shifting attention to institutional recklessness: the willingness to expand jurisdiction until something sticks. The subtext is contemporary, too. It’s a template for how the opposition can keep a presidency from "succeeding" without ever passing a law - by making governance feel perpetually under indictment.