"I WAS WRONG":

Effective philanthropy is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about and reporting on, and so that's the question I set out to answer: Does the Clinton Foundation do worthwhile charitable work?

My starting point, to be honest, was skepticism. Most elite charitable giving is terrible, more a vehicle for wealthy donors' self-aggrandizement than actual change. Donors tend to select causes that are trendy and thus oversaturated with funders as is, or to give to famous organizations regardless of merit. Even when they pick a good cause, like global poverty, screw-ups are common.

Take the PlayPump, a charity fad from the mid-2000s in which merry-go-rounds were attached to water pumps in African villages. The goal was to make it easier to access clean water. The project was catnip to clever design-obsessed philanthropists. Donors loved watching cheerful kids play their way to cleaner water. But when the cameras left, it turned out children were being forced to toil on the playground for hours on end.

I thought it was likely the Clinton Foundation had gotten behind a lot of PlayPump-like projects -- feel-good, sound-great ideas that attracted Clinton's wealthy and well-known friends but didn't really have much of a measurable impact the world.

But I was wrong. After reviewing foundation documents and talking to numerous people in the philanthropy and global health sectors familiar with its work, I've come to the conclusion that the Clinton Foundation is a real charitable enterprise that did enormous good. Its projects are of varying effectiveness, but its work is supported by credible, discriminating funders, and the foundation has least one huge accomplishment under its belt -- an HIV/AIDS program that saved an untold number of lives.

And -- perhaps uncomfortably for liberals and conservatives alike -- it is exactly the kind of unsavory-seeming glad-handing and melding of business and politics for which Bill and Hillary Clinton have taken years of criticism that led to its greatest success.

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