the national interest

Hillary Clinton’s Ethics Problems Are Worse Than She Understands

Regrets, Hillary Clinton hasn’t had quite enough. Photo: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images


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.



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.



Clinton’s Ethics Problems Worse Than She Understands