The strategic potential of sequencing apologia stases: President Clinton's self‐defense in the Monica Lewinsky scandal

With today's advanced media capabilities and accessibility, scandal accusations tend to unfold across time and require an apologist's response before the accusations themselves are fully formed. Yet theories and critical studies of apologia tend to assume a single major apologetic opportunity to address a reasonably complete kategoria with a single primary audience and also assume that an apologist must choose decisively among the four stases of defense (i.e., fact, definition, jurisdiction, quality) to succeed. This essay proposes the notion of a progressive apologia that maintains options and shifts systematically among stases as kategoria gradually unfold. Using President Bill Clinton's response to the evolving Monica Lewinsky scandal across the course of more than a year to illustrate, we argue that featuring the stases in a particular progressive order (fact; then jurisdiction and definition; then finally quality), while maintaining sufficient ambiguity in each stage to preserve the viability of the other stases, explains his success in ways that the current state of rhetorical studies cannot. Critical, theoretical, and pedagogical implications of identifying a progressive apologia model are discussed.