Democrats paid a high price for saving Bill Clinton in 1999 after he became the first elected president impeached in American history.  (Andrew Johnson was elected as vice president, becoming president after Abraham Lincoln's assassination.)

Had Democrats in the U.S. Senate gone along with Clinton's removal for sexual and legal improprieties, his vice president, Al Gore, would have become president and been able to run for two presidential terms with little of the baggage of his predecessor.

Instead, Gore ran in 2000 amid widespread disgust that Clinton had escaped justice, a disgust millions feel today about Bill and Hillary.

Liberal mythology holds that George W. Bush won Florida by a few hundred votes but that the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately halted a recount ordered by the wholly Democrat-appointed Florida Supreme Court that would have made Gore president.

Liberals forget that Bill Clinton-appointed Justice Stephen Breyer cast a key vote concurring that the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount had violated the Constitution's Equal Protection clause.

More importantly, Gore lost the Electoral College vote 271-266 not because of Florida 25 electoral votes alone.  Gore also lost the 11 electoral votes of his own home state of Tennessee, where people who knew him best voted against him.  He also lost the six electoral votes of the Clinton home state of Arkansas.  These are Southern states where biblical morality remains strong.

If Gore had won either Arkansas or Tennessee, he would not have needed Florida to become president, probably for the first of two terms.  And he might have won the combined 17 electoral votes of both if the Clinton scandals were in the rearview mirror of history and Gore were running as the incumbent president.

This is what Democrat politicians threw away by putting politics and power over moral propriety to defend President Clinton.  Had they let Clinton go down, they would still have had President Al Gore.  Instead, fate dealt out retribution and justice.

Amid today's sexploitation scandals, some on the left a generation later seem contrite.  At the Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan wrote that feminists who rushed to defend Bill Clinton in the 1990s were "on the wrong side of history" and that the ex-president deserves to be condemned now.

At Slate, Mark Joseph Stern writes that Senator Al Franken "should resign immediately" following photographic evidence of his groping a woman's body while she slept and other "misogynistic" behavior when she was awake.

Stern's concern seems to be less with Franken's arrogant sexism than that "Democrats' credibility on sexual harassment is at stake" if the party tolerates Franken.  Stern wants this indisputable, embarrassing example of Democratic hypocrisy to disappear.

The liberal assault on Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore over sexual accusations suggests that we may see a lot more of such attacks against Republicans in the 2018 and 2020 Democratic efforts to regain the House, Senate, and White House.

Democrats almost certainly plan to use such lurid last-minute accusations to galvanize the female vote, just as they play the race card to motivate minority voters.  But to do this successfully, Democrats must throw under the bus their own notorious sexploiters such as Bill Clinton, Al Franken, and Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

Democrats also face the challenge of being an identity politics party largely of youthful minority voters, but the face of its leaders is wrinkled and white.  For minorities to take over their party, its geriatric leaders must have power wrested from their cold, white fingers.  The current scandals offer an opportunity to push out Franken and, above all, the Clintons.

Democrats might not see the light of morality, but they do feel the heat of feminist political correctness and the need to regain political power by, as Machiavelli might say, appearing to be more virtuous than Republicans.

Lowell Ponte is a veteran think-tank futurist and author or co-author of eight books.  His latest, co-authored with Craig R. Smith, is Money, Morality & The Machine, available free and postpaid by calling 800-630-1492.  Lowell can be reached for interviews by email at radioright@aol.com.