It may be surprising to see David Broder, king of the already accepted conventional wisdom, take on something a little touchy in a column. Nevertheless, today he is one of the first to take on an elephant in the bedroom that no one seems to be talking about: the Constitutional and practical issues of having an ex-president hanging around his wife the president, injecting marital drama into national affairs.

I say one of the first, but not the first-- here at Mgmax's Blog, we covered this angle on November 2:

When she holds Cabinet meetings, he will likely be there. When she meets with foreign dignitaries, he will stay where Laura or Nancy would have gone. When she has to make a decision, we will always wonder if she did-- or he did.

Bill Clinton will have circumvented the 22nd amendment-- or we'll think he may have. We will have a co-president possibly fighting with the actual president over final decisions-- or not, depending on which ex-aide's tell-all book you read. Disappointed that his first eight years didn't give him the kind of big historical stage on which to be an FDR, Bill will join FDR as the only president with two more terms in which to make his mark by some outsize, self-dramatizing act in the post-9/11 world.

Or will he? The point is, we just don't know. We don't know what really goes on between them. All we know is the spin.

Okay, we weren't the first either, since we quote Charles Krauthammer. But anyway, Broder raises the issue too:

As my friend says, "there is nothing in American constitutional or political theory to account for the role of a former president, still energetic and active and full of ideas, occupying the White House with the current president."

No precedent exists for such an arrangement, and no ground rules have been -- or probably can be -- written. When Bill Clinton was president, the large policy enterprise that was entrusted to the first lady -- health-care reform -- crashed in ruins.

The causes were complex, and some of the burden falls on other people -- Republicans and Democrats in Congress, the interest groups and, yes, the press. But as one who reported and wrote in great detail and length about that whole enterprise, I can also tell you that the awkwardness of having an unelected but uniquely influential partner of the president in charge affected every step of the process, from the gestation of the plan to its final demise. She was never again asked to take on such a project.

And this was simply the confusion sown by having the first lady in charge. Put the former president into the picture -- however "sanitized" or insulated his role is supposed to be -- and the dimensions of the problem become even larger.

No one who has read or studied the large literature of memoirs and biographies of the Clintons and their circle can doubt the intimacy and the mutual dependence of their political and personal partnership.

No one can reasonably expect that partnership to end should Hillary Clinton be elected president. But the country must decide whether it is comfortable with such a sharing of the power and authority of the highest office in the land.

It is a difficult question for any of the Democratic rivals to raise. But it lingers, even if unasked.

Will anyone ask it before it happens, unasked?