Chaiters gonna Chait

They are getting nervous on the Titanic:

When you are a power couple consisting of a former president and a current secretary of State and likely presidential candidate, you have the ability to raise a lot of money for charitable purposes that can do a lot of good. But some of the potential sources of donations will be looking to get something in return for their money other than moral satisfaction or the chance to hobnob with celebrities. Some of them want preferential treatment from the State Department, and others want access to a potential future Clinton administration. To run a private operation where Bill Clinton will deliver a speech for a (huge) fee and a charity that raises money from some of the same clients is a difficult situation to navigate. To overlay that fraught situation onto Hillary’s ongoing and likely future government service makes it all much harder.

That's the voice of Jonathan Chait, a reliable lefty writing in a reliable lefty publication, New York magazine. Chait's piece provides a handy compendium of the various scandals swirling around the Clintons at the moment, including the most recent revelations about the Russians getting a large share of the U.S. uranium supply on Hillary Clinton's watch, all while the Clinton foundation raked in the dough from various financiers associated with the deal.

As always, what's most interesting about the revelations isn't the revelations themselves. Anyone who has ever paid attention to the Clintons knows they are grifters and quite good at it. I see two things going on here:

First, people really aren't paying attention yet. If there's a sense among Democrats that the Hillary campaign will collapse, it's better that it happen now than in, say, July 2016. If Jonathan Chait sees a problem, he's not the only one.While it's later than optimal, there still is time for Elizabeth Warren or some other figure to get into the race. While I know that Martin O'Malley and Jim Webb are planning to run, they aren't getting anywhere.

The real scandal with the uranium deal isn't the Clinton money-grubbing; it's that Clinton was only one of many Cabinet-level officials who signed off on the transaction. From the Times article:

Such is the power of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. The committee comprises some of the most powerful members of the cabinet, including the attorney general, the secretaries of the Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, Commerce and Energy, and the secretary of state. They are charged with reviewing any deal that could result in foreign control of an American business or asset deemed important to national security.

No one else had any misgivings? Eric Holder? Tim Geithner? Robert Gates? Janet Napolitano? Gary Locke? Steven Chu? They all signed off on this deal. I would imagine that President Obama is just furious about learning all this, as I'm certain that he's only learning about this abdication of responsibility now because he's reading it in the newspaper.