Former President Bill Clinton was once the brightest star of the Democratic Party but his luster and previously beloved status has been substantially diminished over the past near-decade.

Though certainly not excommunicated from the party, Clinton has nonetheless been largely shunted to the side -- save for when he is called upon to excite the nostalgia of older Democratic voters -- because of his numerous scandals that occurred before, during, and after his presidency.

Chief among those scandals, per a Fox News report, was the impeachment and acquittal that marred his second term and was centered on his perjurous denial of an extramarital affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Some of Clinton's bigger scandals

According to a 2016 NPR report, former President Clinton has been embroiled in controversy and scandal since even before he served two terms in the White House in the 1990s -- though he has typically dodged ever being held fully accountable for his alleged actions and behaviors.

Clinton's first major scandal, which in a round-about way led to his impeachment over the Lewinsky affair, was the fraudulent Whitewater real estate development deal he was financially involved in as an Arkansas state elected official.

That was followed by Travelgate, which involved the dubious firing of career employees in the White House travel office and their replacement with partisan appointees; the suspicious suicide of White House attorney Vince Foster amid an ethics violations probe; and Filegate, which involved the discovery of hundreds of FBI files on White House employees and congressional Republicans.

Clinton has also come under post-presidential scrutiny over his eponymous Clinton Foundation, specifically the massive contributions the foundation has received from foreign donors, as well as the exorbitant speaking fees he has garnered for speeches and public appearances amid allegations of conflicts of interest and quid pro quo deals.

Clinton's #MeToo moments

It is the lurid details of former President Clinton's multiple sex scandals that typically receive the most attention, however, particularly the impeachment mentioned above for initially lying to federal investigators about his later-admitted extramarital affair with Lewinsky.

Some of the other sexual misconduct scandals, according to The Guardian in 2017, include his payout of $850,000 to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit from Paula Jones, longstanding allegations of rape from Juanita Broaddrick, and claims of sexual assault and harassment from Kathleen Willey, to name just a few of Clinton's several accusers.

Those accusations resulted in Clinton being swept up in the #MeToo movement, per a Politico report in 2018, and ironically involved him expressing his support for the predominately leftist effort to hold powerful men accountable for purported prior sexual abuses even as he defended and excused his own alleged past behavior that fit the description.

Why do Democrats keep trotting out Clinton during election seasons?

Yet, even as Clinton avoided the cultural cancellation that was prevalent in the brief #MeToo era, much like how he survived the impeachment, it was not without considerable damage to his personal and political reputation, particularly among the ever-expanding far-left progressive base of his Democratic Party.

Emblematic of that was an explicit and scathing denouncement by the Daily Beast of Clinton's participation in the 2020 Democratic National Convention, which the outlet viewed as glaringly hypocritical in comparison to the party's staunch criticisms of then-President Donald Trump's alleged sexual misconduct, given Clinton's own alleged checkered past in that same regard.

Indeed, that article even went beyond the typically mentioned sexual assault and harassment allegations from Clinton's several accusers to highlight the former president's once-close relationship with the late convicted pedophile and former Democratic financier Jeffrey Epstein.

However, despite all of that excessive scandalous baggage and more, Clinton continues to be revered by some and tolerated by others within the Democratic Party, especially during election season when he can be trotted out as a bait-and-switch to remind older voters of a better and more stable period in American history that the party's policies have all but ensured will never return again.