With former president Bill Clinton launching something of an apology tour after his Monday-morning Today Show blowup about his impeachment and the era of #MeToo, it’s time to recognize a key lesson from that chapter in American history.

If Democrats had abandoned Bill Clinton in early 1998, they and the country would have been way better off. There was no “higher principle” at stake during the national debate about Clinton’s fate after the revelation of the Lewinsky affair, and blind partisan spite prevented Democrats from recognizing that they had been tricked into defending the indefensible.

In 1998, if Bill Clinton had resigned, Al Gore would have become president. We can argue about how the next two years would have proceeded, but it seems likely that after two years of peace (other than the embassy bombings and the U.S.S. Cole bombing) and runaway prosperity of the peak of the dot-com era, incumbent president Al Gore would have had really good odds for winning the 2000 election.