The Tony Blairing of the Clintons

Imagine Cherie Blair were running to be Britain's next prime minister. Tony Blair's controversial business ethics would sink her chances before launch. US politics has a very different approach to money. Yet the drip, drip of innuendo about Bill Clinton's financial appetites is putting Hillary in an awkward bind. Nobody credible believes the Clinton Foundation has knowingly exchanged favours for money - though there are foreign government donations that raise Caesar's wife questions about propriety. But there is rising disquiet among Democrats about the damage a rhetorically wayward Bill Clinton could do to his wife's chances. It happened in 2008 when Mr Clinton rashly implied Barack Obama was only defeating his wife because he was reaping the unearned black vote. This week Mr Clinton went off the reservation again when said he would keep making $500,000 speeches even while Hillary was campaigning. "I gotta pay our bills," he told NBC News.

It is the kind of thing Tony Blair would say. In the UK, there is far greater license for the politics of envy than in the US - it is one of Britain's least attractive characteristics. But there is also a lower tolerance for hypocrisy, which has been part of Mr Blair's undoing. Since 2001, Mr Clinton has earned $105m in speaking fees. On 13 occasions he has received $500,000 or more for a speech. Eleven of those were given while Mrs Clinton was secretary of state. Among these were two speeches for $700,000 to a Nigerian newspaper, one to an environment fund in the United Arab Emirates and another to a Moscow-based investment bank. Moreover, the Clinton Foundation has conceded that it broke its rule to turn down donations from foreign governments while Mrs Clinton was secretary of state. It took $500,000 from the Algerian government in 2010 for victims of the Haiti earthquake. Since she stepped down it has taken millions from the governments of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and others.

Mr Clinton is right to protest that his foundation does good work in the developing world - "taking money from the wealthy to help the poor", as he put it. Yet it defies common sense to believe such governments would have given money to an American philanthropic group that did not bear the Clinton name. Mr Clinton's motives are lofty. But the coin has two sides. While Algeria was helping out the victims in Haiti in 2010, it spent almost as much that year lobbying the US state department to downplay criticism of its human rights abuses. There is no suggestion its donation to the Clinton Foundation had any sway over Mrs Clinton. But it still looks bad. Much like Mr Blair's tendency to mix business with philanthropy, Mr Clinton is running into a wall of scepticism. There is even a name for it - "Billanthropy".<

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On Monday, Mr Clinton complained to NBC, "There is one set of rules for us [the Clintons], and one set of rules for everyone else." The media, in other words, holds the Clintons to a higher standard. But there is a danger Americans could interpret that comment differently. In an AP-GfK poll last week, 61 per cent of Americans said the word "honest" described Mrs Clinton "only a little or not at all". This is a worrying finding. Then there is the impact on the substance of Mrs Clinton's campaign, which is about the struggling US middle class. There is no question that Mrs Clinton grasps the challenges facing the squeezed middle: she is informed and sometimes passionate. But the politics is another matter. Mr Clinton's Blair syndrome is making her job harder. Joe Klein, the Time columnist, and author of Primary Colors (the then anonymous 1992 novel about the first Clinton campaign) puts it well: "It's near impossible for Hillary Clinton to go around saying, with a straight face, much less a sense of outrage, that the "deck is stacked against" everyday Americans when Bill's partying with the deck stackers," he wrote. Quite so. One way or another, Mrs Clinton will need to rein in her husband.

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