It would be better if he wasn’t on the scene at all. Let us count the ways:

— Implanting a husband in the center of White House policy-making is just a bad idea. All other advisers, from the vice president to the chief of staff to the cabinet members, fade in authority when there’s one person sitting at the table who happens to be married to the boss. It didn’t work very well when the Clintons were offering “two for the price of one” in the 1990s. Turn the marital partner into a former president and it’s like adding a blue whale to the goldfish bowl.

If Hillary wants Bill in her administration, she can give him one of the useful-but-largely-symbolic roles a first spouse traditionally plays. The Clinton Foundation, for all its messes, has done good work in developing countries. Let him be international ambassador to the poor.

— The sex scandal issue isn’t really central, since Americans have a long record of voting for the candidates they think can deliver, regardless of private peccadilloes. And Donald Trump has a history of boorish public behavior that could even overshadow the marital baggage Hillary has to tote. However, she’d be in a much stronger position if she was toting on her own.

— It’s not surprising that the first serious female presidential contender would be someone attached to a famous male name. For most of our history, women who rose in American politics were generally filling in for a deceased (or sometimes indicted) husband. But some still rose to do fantastic things on their own. Margaret Chase Smith got into Congress as a replacement for her late husband, but she became the foremost opponent of McCarthyism in the Senate all by herself. That’s the spirit the Clinton campaign needs. Not running as part of a team with your male predecessor.

Our country is now full of women who’ve become senators, governors, C.E.O.s, diplomats without familial assistance. If they have spouses, they’re off doing their own thing. Or — yes! — taking care of the family. It’s a new world order Hillary has always championed. But the way she’s running her campaign isn’t doing the new world any favors.

Bill isn’t the only man overshadowing her political life. Hillary has also been campaigning as a sort of Barack Obama surrogate who’ll carry on the president’s legacy for another term or two. During a debate in South Carolina, she brought up Obama 10 times — more than the other two candidates on the stage combined. In another debate, she laced into Bernie Sanders for disloyalty. (“The kind of criticism that we’ve heard from Senator Sanders about our president I expect from Republicans.”)

All this identifying with the last two Democratic presidents has left her own political image fuzzy. She’s pledged to do more to crack down on Wall Street, but she hasn’t really said whether the deregulation during her husband’s administration was a mistake. She’s disagreed — briefly — with Obama on matters like immigration, trade and Arctic drilling, but the details are very hard to pin down.