One of the wonderful things about capitalism is that it creates businessmen rich enough to stand up to the politicians. Into that category falls David Geffen, who started in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency, then parlayed a record company into a partnership with Steven Spielberg in a movie studio. Forbes, which says Mr. Geffen is a long-term investor in Edward Lampert’s phenomenally successful hedge fund, now estimates Mr. Geffen’s net worth at $4.6 billion.

Mr. Geffen was quoted by Maureen Dowd in yesterday’s New York Times as saying of President Clinton and Senator Clinton, “Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.” Ms. Dowd traces Mr. Geffen’s falling out with the Clintons to the president’s pardoning of the Swiss-based billionaire Marc Rich while refusing to pardon an American Indian activist, Leonard Peltier, who was convicted of killing two agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Now Mr. Geffen is backing Senator Obama’s campaign for president.

Well, let us just say on the matter of pardons, we do not share Mr. Geffen’s view of Mr. Clinton’s pardons. The pardon power is one the clearest and least fettered to be delegated to the president. It is hard to see any comparison between the cases of Mr. Rich, in which the president shared concerns about the prosecution that had been raised for years by some of America’s most distinguished lawyers and dismissed out of hand by the Justice Department, and Peltier, who, unlike Mr. Rich, is a convicted felon. If Messrs. Geffen and Obama want to seek the presidency on the plank that Peltier should be pardoned, we’d suggest they have their work cut out for them.

The question of Mr. Clinton’s integrity — and, one supposes, by extension that of Mrs. Clinton — is one of the issues the junior senator from New York is going to have to work her way through as she pursues this campaign. It was one of the insights of Robert Bartley, the late editor of the Wall Street Journal, and of R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., the editor of the American Spectator and a contributing editor of The New York Sun, that the president’s compulsion to dissemble was a profound political issue in its own right.

As Mrs. Clinton seeks to address this issue, she will benefit from having done a terrific job in her years as senator, winning re-election by a landslide in a state where even many of us who disagree with her on policy have come to respect the way she has conducted herself in the upper house and in thousands of encounters between Buffalo and the end of Long Island. But we’re not sure that the logical way for her to go about it is to demand that Mr. Obama “remove Mr. Geffen from his campaign and return his money.”

The Californian and his money, after all, were good enough for the Clintons to accept when he was doling hundreds of thousands of dollars out to political operations the Clintons controlled during the 1990s. The left has made an industry in recent years of attacking President Bush’s integrity; Frank Rich’s latest book is subtitled “The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina.” It’s going to be hard for those on the left to call the line of attack illegitimate when it is turned on one of their own by a member of their own party.