Liberal Values Defending Liberty and Enlightened Thought

Despite all her whining that the press is biased toward Obama, Hillary Clinton has actually been the beneficiary of favorable media coverage. During 2007 they played along with her claims of being the inevitable candidate, and didn’t cease doing so until her inevitability claims were shattered by losing. Although Clinton has far less actual experience than Obama they also repeat her claims of being the more experienced candidate. Occasionally a journalist will actually take a look at Clinton’s claims on experience, as the Chicago Tribune did today. They begin by quoting one member of the Clinton administration who is now advising Obama:

“She was never asked to do the heavy lifting” when meeting with foreign leaders, said Susan Rice, who was an assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration and is now advising Obama. “She wasn’t asked to move the mountain or deliver a harsh message or a veiled threat. It was all gentle prodding or constructive reinforcement. And it would not have been appropriate for her to do the heavy lifting.”

The article next looks at some specific claims which Clinton has made. They mention that she “cited ‘standing up’ to the Chinese government on women’s rights and a one-day visit she made to Bosnia following the Dayton peace accords.” In other words she made a speech. She claims that is meaningless that Obama made a controversial speech against the war when running for the Senate, but believes she was courageous for making a speech in China, when she had nothing at stake. The Chinese were hardly going to arrest the First Lady of a visiting country as a dissident. Susan Rice also questions whether this makes her qualified to answer the phone at 3 a.m. “How does going to Beijing and giving a speech show crisis management? There was no crisis. And there was nothing to manage.”

Clinton claimed to have had a role in the negotiations in Northern Ireland.

But Tim Pat Coogan, an Irish historian who has written extensively on the conflict in Northern Ireland, said the first lady’s visits were not decisive in the negotiating breakthroughs in Northern Ireland.

“It was a nice thing to see her there, with the women’s groups. It helped, I suppose,” Coogan said. “But it was ancillary to the main thing. It was part of the stage effects, the optics.

“There were all kinds of peace movements, women’s movements throughout the ‘Troubles.’ But it was more about the clout of Bill Clinton,” added Coogan, who said Clinton administration decisions to grant visas to leaders of the Irish Republican Army’s political wing and appoint a U.S. negotiator were the keys to changing the political climate.

Clinton has also exaggerated the significance of her Macedonia visit:

In 1999, Clinton visited Albanian refugee camps in Macedonia during the NATO bombing campaign to force Slobodan Milosevic’s troops out of Kosovo. Macedonia had sealed its borders in an attempt to stop the arrival of refugees but, under Western pressure, reopened them the day before Clinton visited the camps.

A former Clinton administration official sympathetic to her candidacy said her presence “played a very important role in helping to shore up support for the Kosovars.”

But Ivo Daalder, a former Clinton NSC official with responsibility for the Balkans and author of a history of the Kosovo conflict, said the border opening had nothing to do with her negotiating skills.

“It was her coming that helped. But she had absolutely no role in the dirty work of negotiations,” said Daalder, an Obama supporter. “This had nothing to do with her competence.”

Congressional Quarterly has also questioned Clinton’s claims regarding experience.  The New York Times had a similar review in December, noting that she did not even have security clearance.

Despite Clinton’s claims of being more experienced, Obama has more years of legislative experience than Clinton. Obama’s legal experience is also more significant. While Clinton was a corporate lawyer,  remaining quiet on Wal-Mart’s board as they fought unions, Obama was teaching Constitutional law. This likely has a bearing on Obama’s positions on  separation of church and state and the differences in their views on presidential power and executive privilege. Obama’s experience as a community organizer helps explain the differences in their view of government, with Obama taking less of a top-down approach than Clinton, and influences his political strategy, allowing him to beat the supposedly all powerful Clinton machine.