ONE OF the main problems of Hillary Clinton in her quest to become America’s first female president is voters' lack of trust in her. In December a poll by The Economist/YouGov found that 53% of respondents viewed her as dishonest and untrustworthy. Donald Trump was the only other presidential candidate whom more than 50% of those surveyed considered dishonest and untrustworthy. Mrs Clinton’s main rival, Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, was seen by 41% of respondents as honest and trustworthy, the highest score of any of the main candidates, and only 27% said they didn’t trust him. Young voters, in particular, tend not to trust Ms Clinton—and believe everything Mr Sanders, a senator from Vermont, tells them.
The Clinton Foundation is one of the reasons why voters have taken such a dim view of Mrs Clinton’s integrity. Created in 1997, it is a philanthropic foundation that backs multiple charitable initiatives ranging from economic development in poverty-stricken parts of the world, to fighting climate change, the betterment of lives of women and girls and access to drugs for those who are HIV positive. These are all laudable goals and the charity has won accolades for its impressive work. The problem is that a foundation, which is led by an ex-president and someone who hopes to be elected president by the end of the year, can appear vulnerable to conflicts of interest. One of the reasons that the Clinton Foundation has become such a formidable fund-raising machine is that donors appear to hope to gain access to the corridors of political power with their gifts.
Over the past 15 years, the Clinton Foundation has raised a staggering sum, close to $2 billion, from corporate titans, foreign governments, political donors and other wealthy entities, according to an investigation by the Washington Post. Many of these donors have multiple agendas in addition to their wish to do good. According to the Washington Post, almost half of the major donors who are backing Ready for Hillary, a lobby group promoting her presidential run this year, as well as nearly half of the so-called bundlers, the fundraisers who solicited and pooled her campaign funds in 2008, have given at least $10,000 to the foundation, directly or indirectly through foundations and companies. Donations from banks and other financial institutions account for the largest share of the foundation’s corporate benefactors. Its perhaps most controversial donors are foreign governments or other foreign entities, such as the governments of Oman and Kuwait, which are by law not allowed to give any form of donation to American politicians running for office.
At the Democratic primary debate on February 4th, Mrs Clinton had a heated exchange with Mr Sanders, who told her that being part of the establishment meant having “super PACs”, organisations that pool campaign funds, which raised $15m from Wall Street, and receiving lots of money from drug companies and other special interests. (Mr Sanders does not have a super PAC.) Mrs Clinton lost her cool, accusing her rival of “artful smear” and constant accusations through insinuation and innuendo. She strenuously denied that she has ever been bought by a political donor. Yet by being so close to Wall Street behemoths that support her family’s charitable foundation as well as her political ambitions, Mrs Clinton leaves herself open to such criticisms. The ongoing saga related to her curious use of a private e-mail server during her time as secretary of state adds to an impression of untrustworthiness for some. It would have been relatively easy for the Clinton Foundation to suspend fund-raising efforts during the campaign for the presidency. And it would have given voters one less reason to distrust Mrs Clinton.
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5)

What Explains Obama’s Folly?

JONATHAN S. TOBIN 

Even if Marco Rubio can somehow come back from his awful debate moment on Saturday night, it’s doubtful that any of us will ever forget him getting caught in a feedback loop about whether President Obama knows what he’s doing. Indeed, the agony of that meltdown that has halted his momentum, and may have changed the dynamic of the race, has overshadowed any discussion about the point that he was trying to make. But before we bury Rubio or jump to conclusions about what will happen tomorrow in New Hampshire (about which the pollsters are probably even more clueless than they normally are), it’s worthwhile pondering the question about which he was so certain.
It is actually a topic about which the president’s opponents have always had a somewhat schizophrenic attitude.
On the one hand, Republicans bashed candidate Barack Obama relentlessly in 2008 as a man with a thin resume who was unqualified for the presidency. They speak of how he has mismanaged the government, created boondoggles in health care, and made frequent, tragic mistakes in foreign policy. But there has also always been a competing narrative about Obama on the right that has viewed him as a political mastermind who has foisted a left-wing wing agenda on the country, ruthlessly trashing the Constitution while also shredding traditional alliances in pursuit of misguided goals, such as détente with Iran. On foreign policy, some on the right go even further and speak of him as a secret Muslim or radical associate of the Muslim Brotherhood.
To the extent that these ideas veer into the territory of conspiracy theories, they may be dismissed, as they should be, as the product of the fever swamps of American politics rather than a serious discussion. But, whether you are sympathizing with Rubio or engaging in some schadenfreude about his rote repetition of a talking point, the subject is one that actually needs to be understood if Republicans are to think clearly about how to compete with Democrats or to undo the damage they think the president has done.
That’s why a sober analysis of this question forces us to realize that it is possible that both critiques — ideas and experience — are correct.
Let’s start by acknowledging that the point that Chris Christie and others have made about the importance of experience in government is a good one. President Obama had never run anything before becoming commander-in-chief and his lack of interest in governance issues or the nuts and bolts of how the federal leviathan works shows. The president’s blithe indifference to such details accentuated the inability of the stimulus to create a viable recovery and the incompetence of the ObamaCare rollout. His instinct is to dictate to subordinates and to ignore advice also made it harder for him to work with Congressional Democrats, let alone compromise with opponents in the cause of getting things done.
It can also be argued that his foreign policy blunders — even those, like his indecision over Syria or the nuclear deal with Iran, that he perversely calls triumphs — were in part the product of his inability to understand the nature of America’s geopolitical foes such as Russia and Iran. While it may be easier for some to put his poor negotiating skills down to a conspiracy to undermine U.S. interests or to advance those of bad actors, the more simple answer here is, as is usually the case is, the more persuasive one. Throughout the last 50 years of American history dating back to the debate over Vietnam, opponents of bad policy have always found it hard to accept the notion that seemingly very smart people can do dumb things. But that is often the case, and the Obama team is no exception.
But even if we are prepared to accept that Obama’s inexperience contributed to the failures of his policies, Rubio is right that there is more to it than that.
President Obama is the most liberal president in decades, and his single-minded pursuit of some policies is the function of his ideological obsessions more than it is the result of his inexperience. The president didn’t seek and gain a narrow partisan majority for his signature health care legislation solely because he didn’t know how to compromise but because he wasn’t interested in consensus. The same is true for his foolish pursuit of friendship with America’s geopolitical rivals and decisions to undermine alliances such as his rigid belief in achieving more daylight between the U.S. and Israel.
In that sense, the president has very much known what he was doing. If the president has helped transform America and U.S. foreign policy to make it more closely resemble his liberal vision, it has not been an accident but by design.
Rubio’s line about Obama knowing what he was doing is correct in as so far it concerns his determined campaign to get what he wants on health care, the environment and a host of other domestic issues as well on foreign policy. In 2016, the United States government is bigger and more intrusive and less accountable thanks to Obama’s obsessions and his belief in making end runs around Congress. At the same time, it would be foolish to think that a lot of the problems in Washington were not made worse by the president’s inexperience and lack of comfort with the business of operating with a divided and complex government.
It’s mistake to judge a candidate solely on a resume. Being a governor, even a highly intelligent one, isn’t a guarantee of success as Jimmy Carter and Woodrow Wilson both proved. As Rubio likes to say, the president’s “ideas” are the main problem. But a more polished leader with experience might have left his successor less of a mess.
In our current age of hyper-partisanship, it is probably a given that any president will be assailed as both incompetent and a mastermind of evil policy by his critics. We saw a similar dynamic with leftist critiques of President George W. Bush. He was assailed as an incompetent moron while at the same time also being attacked, either in person or via the proxy demon of Vice President Dick Cheney, as part of a nefarious scheme to subvert America to the interests of the oil industry or some vague neoconservative plot to take over the world.
Republicans would do well to avoid succumbing to such irrational and unproductive arguments. But while governing experience should not be treated as a negligible consideration, neither should conservatives dismiss the power of ideas in shaping a society. Obama has in that sense known what he was doing. No matter who the Republicans nominate, that’s a lesson from the past eight years they ignore at their peril.
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