The Clintons just don’t seem prepared for the modern media world and its tendency to relentlessly pry away at the smallest details.  In the end, this may be a bigger problem for the Clinton campaign than whatever Schweizer’s book reveals.

Bill Clinton was the first presidential target of an Internet scandal. You would think that this would make the Clintons keenly aware of the web’s dangerous powers, the way it ferrets out hidden secrets and blows past official gatekeepers to plaster those secrets on computer screens across the country.  And yet, Bill Clinton survived and even thrived after the Saga of the Blue Dress. Perhaps that taught the Clintons to just stonewall and wait for Republicans to overreach.

This was the wrong lesson to take away. Yes, Republicans overreached in the impeachment, and they might again. But the current question is not a tawdry sex scandal with only tangential relation to Clinton’s political duties; it is a financial scandal that raises questions of selling political influence (the kind that have been raised before about the Clintons). The even greater difference is that the Internet of today is not like the internet with which the Clintons contended in the late 1990s. That was a kinder, gentler beast — in large part tamed by the huge economic boom that short-circuited the nation’s interest in vilifying Bill Clinton. The Monica Lewinsky scandal might have turned out very differently in today’s economy.