You can vote for Hillary Clinton and not be too thrilled about it
By 
My column speculating on possible reasons why Bill Clinton chose to board Loretta Lynch’s plane for a half hour private chat with the AG last week, despite the horrendous optics of that decision, produced a flurry of semi-defenses of Bill’s behavior, including claims that he’s impulsive, possibly going a bit senile, too polite, a compulsive unthinking schmoozer, etc.
Most of these arguments either explicitly or implicitly assert that Clinton acted without realizing that his actions would be potentially harmful to his wife’s candidacy, and possibly even to her legal situation. That assertion seems literally incredible to me. Clinton is not only a lawyer: he’s a former attorney general. He was well aware of how improper his behavior was under the circumstances, but he did it anyway. (To call such an act “impulsive” is to give a very broad meaning to that word, as getting off your own plane to go over to somebody else’s is not what most people would think of as a snap decision).
Anyway, whatever Bill’s motivations may have been, his actions in this matter were of a piece with the Clintons’ consistently cavalier attitude toward things like avoiding the appearance that their favors can be bought for the right price.
Jon Chait is a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton’s presidential run: he utterly despises Donald Trump, and doesn’t think much of Bernie Sanders. He is also inclined to put the most charitable interpretation on the most dubious aspects of Bill Clinton’s presidency. But none of this stops him from making a fair-minded evaluation of the Clintons’ less admirable characteristics:
It should be conceded that the evidence against Clinton is fairly damning. After Bill Clinton left the presidency, the former First Couple intermingled career and personal interests in ways that, at minimum, exposed them to a high risk of contamination. The Clinton Foundation was not only a charitable endeavor but a vehicle for Bill Clinton to enjoy the comforts and exercise the quasi-official power of an active figure on the world stage. Donors to the foundation included many of the same businesses and individuals who paid the Clintons for private speeches, and who had an interest in cultivating close ties with a secretary of State and potential future president. Some of those figures had business interests that aligned with Russian strategic goals rather than American ones. The Clintons failed to promptly disclose all of their foundation donors and, on at least one occasion, appointed an apparently unqualified donor to a State Department board.
The evidence of Clinton corruption is circumstantial rather than direct. If they wanted to stay above reproach, they could have rigorously disclosed every dollar that passed through their personal and professional accounts, and made it plain that neither donating to their foundation nor hiring them for speeches would purchase any special treatment whatsoever — indeed, they bent over backward to demonstrate that they could not be bought. Instead, they profited from the ambiguity. . . It is altogether fair to condemn [Hillary] Clinton as a corrupt practitioner of the Washington cash-for-access culture.
My only quibble with this is that if Hillary Clinton wanted to stay above reproach, it would, for example, have been much better for her not to take millions of dollars from investment banks in exchange for giving a few speeches, as opposed to engaging in any amount of protestation that taking that money wasn’t going to buy anybody any favors.
And of course Chait’s criticisms come in the context of pointing out that while the Clintons have a strong odor of DC influence-peddling hanging about them, they are paragons of virtue in comparison to a straight-up con artist like Donald Trump.
All of which is to say that one can have no ambivalence at all about supporting Hillary Clinton’s presidential run, while still recognizing that both Hillary and Bill continue to represent a lot of what is wrong with the intersection of political power and money in American culture.