If Clinton, or any Democrat for that matter, says Trump is unfit for the presidency, it does nothing to convince Republicans, and may even make Republicans more inclined to support Trump. But if former Reagan and Bush advisers validate Clinton’s claims, other Republicans might take them seriously.

This technique will be intimately familiar to anyone who’s seen a Pepsi drinker choose Coca-Cola in a blind taste test, or whose toothpaste is recommended by four out of five dentists.

It’ll be familiar as well to political junkies who remember the trumped up controversy over an Obama adviser’s description of the administration’s approach to Libya as “leading from behind”; or the undeserved mockery Obama endured after his reelection when he promised to “create a permission structure” that would allow Republicans to cut a budget deal with him.

Whatever your thoughts on mass-market soda pop or Aqua Fresh or the illegal invasion of Libya, recruiting trusted voices to do persuasive work is central to politics and coalition building. John Negroponte isn’t a trusted voice to me, but he may be a trusted voice to people like senator John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who in turn are trusted voices to some number of voters in Arizona and South Carolina. Democrats’ goal is to defeat Trump overwhelmingly, but they probably can’t do that without some unsavory ambassadors.

The problem with “permission structures” isn’t the fact that they rely on the influence of third-party actors, but that they often collapse. Obama never really got the budget deal he wanted, and the less said about Libya the better.

Meanwhile they can create appearances that frustrate more permanent allies. The coalition that will carry Clinton to victory resembles the one that elected Obama twice: young, educated, cosmopolitan voters who liked that he opposed the Iraq war. And if significant numbers of those more dovish voters take a pass in 2016, it won’t do Clinton any good if a few dozen Washington war hawks wrote a letter on her behalf, or showed up to the polls in November.

The danger of being too solicitous of conservatives is that it’ll bump progressives out of the opposite end of a huge, unwieldy coalition. That’s why I argued recently that the right thing for Clinton to offer her new surrogates in exchange for their support is nothing. Abandoning Trump is its own reward and there’s no reason to disrupt the liberal coalition by offering permanent policy concessions for the sake of what will likely be a one-time alliance of necessity.

And so far, that’s exactly what Clinton has offered them: squat. Republicans can support her, and in return they can preserve their dignity. Her economic policy hasn’t swung back to the center since winning the primary, and though most progressives have never been huge fans of her foreign policy, nothing suggests she’s become more hawkish or open to inviting neocons back into the government than she was before the endorsements started rolling in.

The fact that Trump-wary conservatives are saying nice things about Clinton tells us no more about her politics than Clinton-wary progressives tell us about Trump’s politics when they praise aspects of his candidacy. Liberal Clinton skeptics have plenty to be skeptical about without pretending that endorsements like these augur a revival of voodoo economics and the one percent doctrine. That’s not the permission structure Clinton’s building.