Hillary Clinton’s Ethics Problems Are Worse Than She Understands

New York Magazine ^ | August 19, 2016 | Jonathan Chait

[nickcarraway]

“Give a man a reputation as an early riser,” said Mark Twain, “and he can sleep ‘til noon.” Hillary Clinton finds herself in the opposite situation: She has a reputation for venality — the merits of which we can set aside momentarily — that forces her to a higher ethical standard. Her inadequate response to the conflicts of interest inherent in the Clinton Foundation show that she is not meeting that standard, and has not fully grasped the severity of her reputational problem.

The purpose of the Clinton Foundation is to leverage Clinton fame into charitable donations. That purpose has important positive effects — shaking loose donations for AIDS prevention and training African farmers and other worthy causes. But it also has the unavoidable side effect of giving rich people a way to curry favor with a powerful elected official. The Clinton Foundation has announced that, should Hillary Clinton win, it will stop accepting donations from corporations or foreign entities, which mitigates the problem without dispelling it altogether. Wealthy individuals, or corporations passing their money through foundations, can still use Clinton Foundation grants as chits.

Ultimately, there is no way around this problem without closing down the Clinton Foundation altogether. Passing off management of the foundation to non-relatives or other third parties doesn’t do the trick, either. If the Clinton Foundation is not leveraging the Clinton name, it has no purpose.

The Clinton Foundation is a stand-in for the Clintons’ sloppy ethics in general. In the eyes of their enemies, the Clintons are criminals on a world-historic scale; in the eyes of their supporters, innocent victims of a massive smear campaign. The reality is that their venality is rather ordinary. There’s a reason the term politician is synonymous with lying, calculation, and ambition — these are common qualities for politicians. The Clintons are common politicians, motivated in general by a desire to implement policy changes they think will make the world a better place, but not immune to trimming and getting rich in the process. None of their behavior is disqualifying, given the number of elected officials, presidents included, who have done the same. Neither does it justify it.

It is unfair for Hillary Clinton that her skeptics, many of them sexist, imagine her as a figure of unique malevolence and corruption. But politicians have to deal with unfair circumstances rather than wish them away. The most recent Pew Survey finds Clinton winning the under-30 vote by a mere 11 percentage points, 38 percent to 27 percent, less than half the margin Barack Obama carried four years ago. Her campaign has treated its weakness with young voters as primarily an ideological problem. And it is true that left-wing activists distrust Clinton’s centrist impulses. But the professional left does not reflect the Democratic electorate as a whole. Voters who supported Sanders in the primary, but who have not embraced Clinton, are actually less liberal on the whole than Clinton’s supporters. That is because the heart of Sanders’s appeal was to good-government voters who embraced his image as an authentic practitioner of earnest, uncorrupted politics.

For Sanders, and his most philosophical adherents, his campaign represented a revolt not only against Clinton but against the entire center-left orientation of the party, including Barack Obama and his compromising, neoliberal ways. But the same younger voters who regard Clinton with suspicion adore Obama. The same Pew Survey that finds voters under 30 giving Clinton just 38 percent of the vote finds those voters approve of Obama’s job performance by 58 percent to 36 percent. That is not because Obama has more left-wing policies. If anything, Clinton has positioned herself slightly to the president’s left, even opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership he continues to tout. The reason is that Obama has avoided scandals that have any legitimacy outside the imaginations of the right-wing fever swamps, while Clinton is seen as inauthentic and corrupted.

The most enduring aftereffect of her extended primary fight with Sanders was to import Republican attacks on her character into liberal messaging. Sanders emphasized real issues like collecting speaking fees from Goldman Sachs rather than fake issues like the murder of Vince Foster, but the impact was the same — it reintroduced Clinton, to a generation that had never voted for her or her husband, as a shadowy, duplicitous insider. Endorsing all sorts of liberal programs Congress will never pass and letting Sanders’s supporters write the party platform hardly solves this problem.

The risk that Clinton’s tainted image will defeat her is small but real enough to merit concern. The much larger risk is that her lax approach to rule-following and ethical conflicts will sink her presidency.

[Disestablishmentarian]

>>If you are a Clinton apparently you can give 10% to the “cause” <<

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

NO. They give 10% to their fraudulent cronies and claim it’s going to needy causes.

The other 90% they just pay directly to themselves, family and entourage.

[oldbrowser]

This is a time honored scam. The Kennedy’s have been involved for three generations in charitable organizations and have done quite well for themselves. It's known as doing well by doing good. The organizations seem specialize in bringing awareness to various problems like the climate by having lavish meetings with wealthy people .

[yoe]

"... her lax approach to rule-following and ethical conflicts..."

Lax? Is that the Politically Correct way of saying the woman was reckless to a fault about the security of her country? Hillary is/was not only foolhardy to the extreme she lied about her thoughtless negligence to the world. She has lied her way through the last 33+ years and probably before that...she had passed the Arkansas bar exam, she had failed the one in Washington — a piece of information that wasn't publicly revealed until thirty years later.......Never trust a person who has lied to you twice...the first time was a warning and the second time a lesson that there would never be a third time. Hillary Clinton is not in anyway, shape or form trustworthy...she is not worthy of a seat on the town council let alone as POTUS. AND as a Socialist/Marxist Hillary will not obey the US Constitution.

[yoe]

"... her lax approach to rule-following and ethical conflicts..."

Lax? Is that the Politically Correct way of saying the woman was reckless to a fault about the security of her country? Hillary is/was not only foolhardy to the extreme she lied about her thoughtless negligence to the world. She has lied her way through the last 33+ years and probably before that...she had passed the Arkansas bar exam, she had failed the one in Washington — a piece of information that wasn't publicly revealed until thirty years later.......Never trust a person who has lied to you twice...the first time was a warning and the second time a lesson that there would never be a third time. Hillary Clinton is not in anyway, shape or form trustworthy...she is not worthy of a seat on the town council let alone as POTUS. AND as a Socialist/Marxist Hillary will not obey the US Constitution....she is above that document and its laws.....

[gunsmithkat]

I like how Chait mis-characterizes the purpose of the Clinton Foundation nee. Crime Syndicate. It was certainly never to provide charity but rather jobs and sinecures for the Clinton Crime Family and all it’s hangers on.

[William Tell]

How many of us would pay Chelsea Clinton $950,000 per year for anything? What justifies that salary?

[Jeff Chandler]

her skeptics, many of them sexist

What a putz.

[Thank You Rush]

Well written...more substance than the usual criticisms...

[Stand Watch Listen]

[BwanaNdege]

“The climax came as Jehu entered the city gate. Reaching the palace, he looked up to the window from which came the taunting voice of Jezebel: “Is it peace, thou Zimri, thou murderer of thy master?” Such a taunt maddened her victorious enemy, and seeing the two eunuchs standing at the window with the defiant queen he shouted up to them, “Who is on my side? Who? Throw her down!”

They obeyed and threw her out of the window, and as she fell the walls were sprinkled with her blood. Below her were the soldiers with their spears, the horses to tread her underfoot and the hungry dogs waiting for her flesh. “The triumphant Jehu entered the palace over Jezebel’s dead body. As he ate and drank, he remembered that the one who had just died as prophesied had been a queen and a mother of kings, so he ordered—

Go, see now this cursed woman, and bury her. And they went to bury her, but they found no more of her than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands.”

https://www.biblegateway.com/resources/all-women-bible/Jezebel-No-1

[catnipman]

“That purpose has important positive effects — shaking loose donations for AIDS prevention and training African farmers and other worthy causes.”

Uh,yeah that WOULD have been “worthy” if 94% of the money hadn’t gone to “employees”, travel, “training”, other expenses, leaving only 6% for donations.