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HNN Poll: Why Did So Many People Hate Bill Clinton?

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Why did Bill Clinton draw the hatred of millions of Americans? In his new book, The Clinton Wars, Sidney Blumenthal offers several reasons (outlined in the passage below).

What do you think?

From The Clinton Wars (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), pp. 49-50:

[Bill] Clinton had all sorts of natural opponents, whose differences with him were based on their interests, partisan attachments, and professional work. But his clashes with them summoned up irrational forces almost from the start. Clinton's triumph over the personal assaults made on him during the campaign--the ones centered on sex, class, and patriotism--hardly quelled the animosities; in fact, his electoral victory aroused them further. Each of his enemies had an individual interest in damaging him; unreason found many constituencies. Almost any incident in his presidency set off a cascade of vituperation. Endless apocryphal stories, tall tales, and legends were generated that supposedly revealed the true Clinton--or the true Mrs. Clinton.

If there is a law about progressive presidencies it is not that they run in recurring cycles like a regular alignment of the planets, but that in their efforts to create a new consensus they become the object of intense opposition. The opposition fails to distinguish between hatred of the man and hatred of his politics. And an attack on morals has always gone hand in hand with an attack on politics. Members of what became Thomas Jefferson's party were hounded, fined, and imprisoned under the Alien and Sedition Acts signed by President John Adams--"the reign of witches," Jefferson called it. Jefferson himself was assailed as a godless anarchist, a sexual mauler, an adulterer, a betrayer of friends, a chronic liar, and, lastly, a keeper of a black concubine. Andrew Jackson had an election stolen from him; in the next contest, he was painted as the son of a prostitute and a mulatto, a bigamist, crook, and murderer; in the next, as "King Andrew," trampling the Constitution. In office, in payment for his fiercely fought positions, he became the first president ever censured by the Senate, for having, it charged, "assumed upon himself authority and power not conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in derogation of both." Had his enemies had a majority in the House, he would undoubtedly have been the first president to be impeached. Lincoln was caricatured as a baboon, a primate from the frontier Midwest, a "black Republican," perhaps black himself, a trickster storyteller, Dishonest Abe. Franklin Roosevelt was despised as a traitor to his class, a dictator, habitually dishonest, a feebleminded playboy, and a warmonger. John F. Kennedy was loathed as a betrayer of national security, a communist sympathizer, a traitor, a Catholic Negro-lover, a libertine liberal, an illegitimate pretender, a fraud, and a calculating dissembler.
The pattern of these attacks cannot be dismissed as the usual cut and thrust of political combat, as mere name-calling or the customary jockeying for office. These presidents were castigated as they were because they represented new and broader forms of democracy. And there were essentially no built-in limits to the attacks on them. If the presidents could have been destroyed or removed from office, their enemies would have gladly done so. They were perceived as personifying dangerous threats to established order and morals. They stood for new rights for new constituencies, the breakup of established power, a new identity for the nation, and the aggressive use of the executive branch to achieve those aims. And since, given the very nature of their proposals for innovative programs, these presidents had to act politically, shifting and twisting, they were especially vulnerable to charges of disorder and dishonesty.