Yes, I know her (well, I know of her). She’s very capable and well respected.
That sounds great, but the issue that will dog Hillary is Bill’s involvement as a fund raiser for them. It’s one thing for a first spouse to go out and advocate for little kids reading, or eating vegetables. It’s quite another when they are cashing multi-million dollar checks that pay into the family foundation. I’m not knocking the foundation, I’m just saying that ethically speaking this is very new ground.
I understand that Congress allows its members to have foundations, PACs, and other fund-raising organizations. That reeks of corruption too, but congress is a debating body. An individual congress person doesn’t have much power other than their vote and the ability to introduce legislation for consideration. The President, on the other hand, can dispatch the most powerful armies, fleets, and aircraft the world has ever seen with a phone call, and oversees a massive global intelligence network that has powers too.
It may sound like I’m being unreasonable to expect the President to adhere to a much higher ethical standard but it really isn’t. George W. Bush used all that power unethically with the Iraq war. The only thing his administration did competently in that whole fiasco was to secure the mining rights for his 0.01% buddies in the oil industry. I know this isn’t new for American presidents - we did a lot of gunboat diplomacy early in the 20th Century, the West used to belong to Indian nations, etc - but it really needs to stop.
Obama has thankfully not followed in Bush’s footsteps, but he didn’t reset the ethical bar by prosecuting Bush administration folks for violating the war crimes act either. I wish he had because the standard is still set very low. I have friends in the military. If either Trump or Clinton take office I fear that they will be deployed for “muscular foreign policy” initiatives that don’t make us safer but do make their 0.1% friends richer. Tulsi Gabbard thinks the same way, which is why we both support Sanders.
So yes, I think Bill should step down and put the Clinton Foundation into a blind trust. I’m sure there are people who believe that “absolute power corrupts absolutely” does not apply when the Clintons are involved, but I’m not one of them.