This is an issue for Hillary’s campaign and things will get much worse if she wins the Primary. Hillary’s supporters need to acknowledge the problem, not try and duck it, deny it, Flag or shut down those who raise it, etc. The #1 lesson in politics is to own up to any scandal, not to try and suppress it. Get it out, everything, all the facts, as soon as possible. Doing so before the Primary election will only be to Clinton’s advantage in the General, if she wins the Primary.
The New York Times is not Fox News, not Red State. Journalist Amy Chozick is not a right-wing hack. Her sources, including published books by Bill Clinton’s former Communications Director George Stephanopolos and Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame), are not a right-wing conspiracy. Here’s some of what the NYT article, from today Jan 20, 2016, by Amy Chozick, says:
...deeper debate [is] unfolding among liberal-leaning women about how to reconcile Mrs. Clinton’s leadership on women’s issues with her past involvement in her husband’s efforts to fend off accusations of sexual misconduct…. And in recent weeks, the scandals of the 1990s and Mrs. Clinton’s role in them have taken on a life of their own, delivering an unexpected headache to a campaign predicated on inspiring female voters. … [T]he resurfacing of the scandals of the 1990s has brought about a rethinking among some feminists about how prominent women stood by Mr. Clinton and disparaged his accusers... Even some Democrats who participated in the effort to discredit the women acknowledge privately that today, when Mrs. Clinton and other women have pleaded with the authorities on college campuses and in workplaces to take any allegation of sexual assault and sexual harassment seriously, such a campaign to attack the women’s character would be unacceptable. ... Mrs. Clinton supported the effort to push back against the women’s stories … according to multiple accounts at the time, documented in books and oral histories.
“We have to destroy her story,” Mrs. Clinton said of one of the first women to come forward during her husband’s first presidential campaign, Connie Hamzy, in 1991, according to George Stephanopoulos, a former Clinton administration aide who described the events in his memoir, “All Too Human.’’ When Gennifer Flowers later surfaced, claiming that she had a long affair with Mr. Clinton, Mrs. Clinton undertook an “aggressive, explicit direction of the campaign to discredit” Ms. Flowers, according to an exhaustive biography of Mrs. Clinton, “A Woman in Charge,” by Carl Bernstein. Mrs. Clinton referred to Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern who had an affair with the 42nd president, as a “narcissistic loony toon,” according to one of her closest confidantes, Diane D. Blair, whose diaries were released to the University of Arkansas after her death in 2000. Ms. Lewinsky later called the comment an example of Mrs. Clinton’s impulse to “blame the woman.”
Over the years, the Clinton effort to cast doubt on the women included using words like “floozy,” “bimbo” and “stalker,” and raising questions about their motives. James Carville … was especially cutting in attacking Ms. Flowers. “If you drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find,” Mr. Carville said of Ms. Flowers. Now that the stories are resurfacing, they could hamper Mrs. Clinton’s attempts to connect with younger women, who are learning the details of the Clintons’ history for the first time. … Paula Jones ... and Juanita Broaddrick [have] re-emerged in the news media. “It’s not about Bill Clinton’s peccadilloes,” said Camille Paglia, a feminist author and professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and a supporter of one of Mrs. Clinton’s rivals, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “It’s about Hillary Clinton’s behavior towards her husband’s accusers for all those years.”
What we write on DailyKos does not control the national media. We cannot decide whether stories like this appear in mass-media or not. We are observors, not shapers of these news stories. To deny them here is to set ourselves up for failure. Better to get out ahead of the stories, then to constantly be playing catchup and denial.