Politics & Power Quote by George Stephanopoulos

Stephanopoulos packages betrayal as a riddle, and that choice is doing a lot of work. Calling it “The Clinton paradox” turns a messy scandal into something closer to a tragic character flaw: a brilliant man undone by appetites that don’t match his intellect. It’s not just moral disappointment; it’s cognitive whiplash. The line stacks virtues — “intelligent…compassionate…public-spirited…conscious of his place in history” — like a résumé written by a loyal aide, then detonates it with “stupid, selfish and self-destructive.” The contrast isn’t subtle; it’s prosecutorial.

The subtext is personal. Stephanopoulos wasn’t a distant commentator; he was a Clinton-world insider who built a career on the promise of a new kind of politics. So the question is also a confession: How did we misread him? How did we rationalize the risk? By framing Clinton’s behavior as inexplicable, Stephanopoulos preserves the earlier idealism while still condemning the act. “Paradox” becomes a way to say: I believed in the man, and I can’t square that belief with the wreckage.

Context matters because the Clinton era sold competence as a brand. This wasn’t a leader undone by incompetence but by impulse, and that’s why it stung: the scandal didn’t merely threaten a marriage or an administration, it threatened the story Democrats told about themselves after Reagan-Bush. The sentence works because it’s half indictment, half mourning — a neat, media-ready formulation of how a presidency can be eclipsed not by enemies, but by the smallest, most avoidable decisions.