Posted on 08/19/2016 3:49:35 PM PDT by 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.
Psychopaths do not acknowledge ethics in this world. The concept is meaningless to them and their agendas.
Why isn’t she in prison??????
Anyone of the rest of us would be in prison, if not worse, for doing the things she did to line her pockets and sell out her coutry.
Hillary is a horrible excuse for a human being, let alone an American!
How any true American could stay home, let alone vote for this ghastly woman is just mind boggling. This carpet-munching weirdo is far beneath Donald Trump in any category!
If, thanks be to Satan, she is indeed propelled into the oval orifice which was disgraced by the syphilitic ass she’s welded to, then goodbye America!
Maybe not all the press is in the tank
Unfair? What a steamin' pile.
she has the ethics of Jezebel.. The wicked witch of the west.
The purpose of the Clinton Foundation is to leverage Clinton fame into charitable donations.
Allow me to correct this sentence for the author:
The purpose of the Clinton Foundation is to leverage Clinton influence into Clinton wealth. A key correction because there is nothing charitable about this. It simply makes “donors” feel/look better about the bribe and they can write it off on their taxes.
This is good work if you can get it.....
Article Started off okay then jumped the tracks, through te weeds and over the embankment.
“And it is true that left-wing activists distrust Clinton’s centrist impulses.”
Bwahahaha
Clinton and “ethics” in the same sentence does not compute.
5.56mm
You can’t seriously be asking that? I guess you didn’t live through the 90’s.
A minuscule percentage of donations are distributed as aid.
Well said!
If she manages to steal the election, she will rival Stalin and that is not an exageration.
And the putrid, vile witch would soon become one of the wealthiest scum on earth.
No it doesn't.
IIRC something like only 10% of the donations actually go to charity. And the organizations that give grades to charities give the Clinton foundation a very low grade.
...”The purpose of the Clinton Foundation is to leverage Clinton fame into charitable donations”....
Well it’s much more than just that IMO. There’s a lot of hands in that pie though Clintons basically control it.
But the Foundation is tied up with International NGO’s of various sorts...it’s all used as a slush fund and leveraging whatever they want to use it for. ...it travels the same circut lines.
Ethics are for the little people.
A minuscule percentage of donations are distributed as aid.
If you are a Clinton apparently you can give 10% to the “cause” and keep the other 90% for administrative costs. It’s worse than that because most of the disbursements of “charity” went to friends of the Clintons who in turn donated to the Clinton Foundation. This is purely a criminal enterprise and it is hopelessly co-mingled between the charity, the foundation, and the speaking fees.
I am not a fan of new laws and we have too many, but I would not mind a law that required charitable tax deductions to be given to organizations that give at least 75% of funds to the stated purpose. Same requirement for them to have tax exempt status.
That seems pretty reasonable to me.
Its the pink stay puff marshmellow queen.
I guess it all depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. . . .
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