One of the unresolved worries about a Hillary Clinton Presidency is her husband, Bill. Some of the discomfort has to do with his past: his unfortunate history with women; the perception that donors to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation might have expected special access to Hillary Clinton; the discomfiting spectacle of the former President zipping around the world in various private jets, collecting exorbitant speaking fees. (Between 2001 and the launch of Hillary’s Presidential campaign, she and Bill were paid more than a hundred and fifty million dollars for speeches; we know that because the Clintons, unlike Donald Trump, disclosed their tax returns.) We can reasonably hope that, at age seventy, somewhat chastened, and living under steady scrutiny again, Bill Clinton won’t inflict the same sort of damage he once did. And, in August, he announced that, if his wife is elected, he will step down from the board of the Foundation and cease personally raising money for it. So, then, perhaps, the worry is less about the past than about the potential future. If Hillary Clinton wins the White House, what exactly is to be done with him?

The easy part of this question is the slightly silly one: what to call him. First Lady is not an official title, and, although it has been a little too British and manorial for the United States all along, it has stood the test of time and is unlikely to fade away anytime soon. So First Gentleman will have to suffice, on the grounds of equivalency, even though it gives the perfect opening for asking how much of a gentleman he really is. (First Man or First Dude obviously won’t fly, and the gender-neutral First Spouse isn’t really parallel.) In a column this week, Miss Manners points out that protocol dictates that Bill would be addressed as Governor Clinton—the last, highest, non-exclusive position he held. So that, at least, would eliminate the confusion of two President Clintons announced at state dinners.

The bigger question is what he should actually do as First Gentleman. Back in May, Hillary Clinton told voters in Kentucky that, under her Administration, her husband would be “in charge of revitalizing the economy, because, you know, he knows how to do it.” That same month, she said he has “got to come out of retirement” and take on job creation. That struck many people as an awfully broad mandate. Luckily, she seems to have dropped that idea—or, at least, we haven’t heard it lately. It might have been a spur-of-the-moment bid for the hearts and minds of working-class voters in coal country who remember her husband fondly.

Last week, two journalists offered their own very different proposals. In The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg argued that Hillary Clinton could appoint her husband as “a super-negotiator” for the Middle East. As a figure of “singular stature” in that part of the world, who as President had come closer than anyone else to achieving a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians, he could be entrusted with a second chance, Goldberg wrote. Such a posting would have the additional advantage, he said, of getting Bill Clinton “out of the house.” In the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus suggested that, on the contrary, the best course Bill Clinton could follow would be to keep a very, very low profile: “For the first female president, the focus needs to be on her, not on her ex-president spouse. This would be true even without Bill Clinton’s sexual and financial history, but those factors underscore the wisdom of him being as invisible a First Gentleman as possible.”

Marcus has it right. Hatred of the Clintons is too combustible to risk inflaming it with another two-for-the-price-of-one deal. When political spouses, no matter how qualified or experienced, overstep their bounds, it strikes us as undemocratic and dynastic. Remember Hillary Clinton’s own awkward, unloved turn when her husband put her in charge of health-care reform? And if Bill Clinton is First Gentleman he will already be in a delicate, unprecedented position—a former President back in the White House, a man in a role previously occupied exclusively by women. If he were a doctor or an engineer or a painter, he could pursue his chosen profession while his wife served as President. But the best he can do, as a politician, is to stay low-key and out of trouble. It’s not time to reinvent the role but, rather, to play it with dignity and no obvious signs of restless discontent, as both Laura Bush and Michelle Obama managed to do. That might be difficult for a man of his energy and ambition, but in this general election he has mostly succeeded as a disciplined, supportive spouse—giving speeches focussed on his wife’s plans for the country, and not getting into too many rhetorical scrapes.

I think it might be asking too much of him to do as Marcus suggests—“No pet projects, however unobjectionable. Instead, let Bill Clinton enjoy the grandkids. Play some golf, without having to worry about using it to line up speaking fees. Time for a new dog”—and retire entirely. First of all, he’d serve as a sounding board and informal adviser to his wife, as political spouses of both sexes nearly always do. And there is nothing wrong with a pet project, per se: as First Ladies, at least since Lady Bird Johnson, have done, he could take up and help promote an issue or issues he cares about—not in an official capacity or even as a special envoy but as a gentle persuader with a national platform. These issues should not be controversial—Laura Bush’s encouragement of literacy and Michelle Obama’s commitment to healthy eating hit the right mark—but that still leaves plenty of choice. For Bill Clinton, the issue might be national service or early-childhood education (following one of the Clinton Foundation initiatives, Too Small to Fail), along with encouraging parents and other adults to read and talk more with young children. As a new grandfather himself, he could be a role model in that regard, a Grandpa-in-Chief. Playing that part certainly wouldn’t give him the power he would have as a super-negotiator or a jobs czar, but it wouldn’t carry the considerable risk, either. And it would leave him time to work on that garden Michelle Obama started! He’s a vegan now; he’ll want those organic veggies. The answer to the question of what Bill Clinton should do is, it turns out, pretty simple: not nothing—but not much.