Hillary Clinton has tried to make much of her 'experience' while in the White House alongside her then-president husband.
A New York Times on-line article today, however, pokes a few holes in the Clintonian mythos:
"In seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, Mrs. Clinton lays claim to two traits nearly every day: strength and experience. But as the junior senator from New York, she has few significant legislative accomplishments to her name. She has cast herself, instead, as a first lady like no other: a full partner to her husband in his administration, and, she says, all the stronger and more experienced for her 'eight years with a front-row seat on history'."
"But during those two terms in the White House, Mrs. Clinton did not hold a security clearance. She did not attend National Security Council meetings. She was not given a copy of the president’s daily intelligence briefing. She did not assert herself on the crises in Somalia, Haiti and Rwanda."
"And during one of President Bill Clinton’s major tests on terrorism, whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, Mrs. Clinton was barely speaking to her husband, let alone advising him, as the Lewinsky scandal sizzled."
"Her rivals scoff at the idea that her background gives her any special qualifications for the presidency. Senator Barack Obama has especially questioned “what experiences she’s claiming” as first lady, noting that the job is not the same as being a cabinet member, much less president."
"Friends of Mrs. Clinton say that she acted as adviser, analyst, devil’s advocate, problem-solver and gut check for her husband, and that she has an intuitive sense of how brutal the job can be."
“Making tough decisions, responding to crises, making the bureaucracy implement decisions that they may not want to implement — that’s the hard part of foreign policy,” Susan Rice, a National Security Council senior aide and State Department official under Mr. Clinton who now advises Mr. Obama, said. “That’s not what Mrs. Clinton was asked or expected to do as first lady.”
I, too, scoff at her claims.
And even I have "an intuitive sense of how brutal the job can be", but that doesn't make me worthy of being president.
And her 'experience' on the Armed Services Subcommittee has not been all it could have been, either, by all reports.
26 December 2007
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