Hillary as Secretary of State: Wait a Minute, What About Bill?

Although the Guardian is saying that Hillary is about to accept the invitation to become the third woman to serve as Secretary of State, I am wondering how she can take this position and not put some restraints on Bill Clinton's ability to raise funds for the Clinton Global Initiative.

According to its own website, the Clinton Global Initiative has pledges from 1,000 entities amounting to $30 billion to "improve the lives of 200 million people in over 150 countries."

That's an awful lot of money. It's not just the Global Initiative, but the Clinton Presidential Library, too. Bill likes to ask people for money. According to the New York Times, Clinton has raised $500 million since he established the Library Foundation in 1998. Last year he collected $10.1 million in speaker's fees. According to The Daily Beast, Bill just collected $500,000 for a single speech in Kuwait. That's even high for Bill.

How can he continue to collect that kind of fealty with her acting on behalf of the United States government?

Yet the Guardian reports that vetting the donations to the foundation is unlikely to cause Hillary a problem.

Back in March 2008, when Hillary was still battling Barack for the Democratic nomination, Bill Bradley (former NBA star, Rhodes Scholar, US Senator from New Jersey, and former contender for the Democratic nomination) worried about the impact of Bill's fundraising on Hillary's ability to run for the presidency against John McCain, if she won the nomination. Here is what Sam Stein reported Bill Bradley said in the Huffington Post:

"I think Barack Obama has a much stronger chance of beating John McCain in the general election. I think Hillary is flawed in many ways, and particularly if you look at her husband's unwillingness to release the names of the people who contributed to his presidential library.

And the reason that is important -- you know, are there favors attached to $500,000 or $1 million contributions? And what do I mean by favors? I mean, pardons that are granted; investigations that are squelched; contracts that are awarded; regulations that are delayed.

These are important questions. The people deserve to know. And we deserve, as Democrats, to know before a nominee is selected, because we don't want things to explode in a general election against John McCain."

Ummmm. Transparency?