Welcome back to the Democratic primary.

If you remember way back when, a concern Hillary Rodham Clinton faced was the secrecy surrounding donations to her husband’s Clinton Foundation. Bill Clinton insisted that all donations remain undisclosed to the public, despite whispers from her campaign rivals that those donations could be used to funnel contributions to HRC’s campaign.

That’s clearly no longer operative. But according to Politico, the Clinton Foundation remains unwilling to disclose its donor list to Obama’s vetters:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is President-elect Barack Obama’s first choice for secretary of State but his aides are becoming exasperated by the Clinton camp’s pokey response to demands for extensive information about former President Bill Clinton’s finances, according to numerous Democrats involved in the process.

“The sense among the no-drama Obama world is: This is well on its way to winning best Oscar for drama,” said one well-connected Democratic official.

There’s a probable kabuki element here. The Politico piece says Clinton may clear up remaining obstructions in the coming days — suggesting the Obama people planted the Politico story as a way to nudge Clinton along. Whether or not that’s true, it isn’t in Clinton’s interest for her husband to keep the donor list a secret if she wants to be secretary of state. The Republicans may have a reduced minority in the Senate, but they could still tie up her confirmation hearings in an ugly and embarrassing manner.

Back in fall 2007, Bill Clinton said that he’d release the donor list if Hillary won the presidential election. Is that pledge still operative if she accepts the secretaryship? His little-noticed recent comments to Philanthropy magazine, from September, suggest at least a partial disclosure, though the context is admittedly very different:

The only reason I didn’t want to do the library donors is that no previous president had. I suppose if Hillary were elected president, or maybe even if she had been nominated, we would have had to go back to the donors and at least disclose everyone that didn’t object to it. But I wouldn’t have any objection to it.

With foreign donors, but also with domestic ones, if there’s any question, we do exhaustive vetting. I can recall some money we haven’t taken and also some we did but only after more than a year of efforts to make sure that everything was okay.

Yglesias adds:

But I don’t really see how you could have a Secretary of State whose husband was engaged in that kind of fundraising. Or, more generally, who’s involved in the kind of freelance foreign policy work that Bill does as head of the Foundation. I wrote some about this during the primaries, and my sense of it was that the Clinton camp understood this would be an issue were Hillary to become President, and that something would need to change. To me, it’s just the same if she’s Secretary of State — something would need to be worked out.

A good point, and one I hadn’t thought of. Bill Clinton’s work with the Clinton Global Initiative would inevitably be viewed as an adjunct to Secretary of State Clinton’s work on behalf of the Obama administration. It would be both unfair and entirely predictable.