Tested ... ready ... wrong? What the media isn't asking about Hillary
Hillary Clinton was successful in derailing Barack Obama's attempts to take Ohio and Texas from her last night (she had been up by 20 points in both states, won Ohio by 10 and squeaked by in Texas, though she lost the caucuses there.) Exit polls suggest she essentially did so by raising doubts about Barack's experience in the minds of blue collar white men, and late deciding Dems.
OK.
But the media has been awfully quick to accept the fundamental premise of the Clinton campaign: that she is the more experienced person on matters of foreign policy and national security, and as such, is the person you'd want answering that phone at 3 a.m. in a crisis.
Really?
Well since we're now in a "real contest about the differences between Hillary and her opponent," to paraphrase her, isn't it time for the media to stop handing Hillary a pillow and ask tough questions about precisely what her experience is? After all:
Hillary has never been a commander in chief -- not even of a state's National Guard.
She has no management experience, beyond the management of her political campaigns.
She has no direct military experience, beyond her service on the Senate Arms Services Committee -- a feat that gives her information, to be sure, and relationships for certain, but no leadership experience. She doesn't chair the committee, and the committee does not set policy for the United States military.
She has only been a Senator two years longer than Barack Obama, who sits on the Senate's foreign relations committee -- arguably giving him about the same level of access to information about U.S. policy (and the same dearth of managerial responsibility...)
She has no management experience, and thus cannot present a single example of organizational leadership.
The one example of policy leadership Hillary can present was her stint as chair of the president's commission on health care -- a stint that ended in failure.
She often touts her eight years in the White House as "experience," but the only such experience Hillary has was as first lady -- not as a cabinet member. That means she has precisely the level of White House experience that Laura Bush, Nancy Reagan, or Betty Ford had. And not to denigrate the role of first lady, but this is a position which has no leadership function whatsoever. The first lady's most senior advisor is her social secretary. She is dispatched around the world to put a pleasant face on America, and occasionally to put a face on a president's policies or policy goals, but no serious person would suggest that any of the aforementioned ladies was qualified to be president based on their proximity to the men who were.
If Hillary expects us to count her time in the White House as part of her "35 years of experience," she needs to explain why. Otherwise, we're left with her time as an attorney, her stints on corporate boards, and other real life experiences that are no more predictive eof presidential acumen than Barack Obama's roles as a civil rights attorney and community organizer. In fact, if Hillary isn't telling us that being first lady qualifies her to be president, then she is saying that being a lawyer and advocate for children is what does the trick. Well how is that better than Barack's experience, which includes more years as a legislator (in Illinois) than she has?
The plain truth is that Hillary's claims to international experience ARE based on her time as first lady, and the media's ready acceptance of those claims presents a dangerous proposition: that as first lady, Hillary was making foreign policy decisions, and weighing in on matters of national security, rendering her more ready to respond to a crisis from inside the White House going forward. If that was true duing the Bill Clinton administration, then the then-president placed an unelected family member -- his wife -- in charge of this nation's security, without letting the American people in on that fact. I thought the impeachment of Bill Clinton was one of the greatest constitutional outrages in modern history, but if he was giving Hillary that red phone to answer during his presidency, I would have definitely favored impeachment for that.
Imagine, for a moment, Nancy Reagan running for president in 1992 on the claim that she and her psychics were working hand in hand with Ronald Reagan to respond to Cold War crisis. The shudder you feel is the first gasp of the reality that when it comes to Hillary and her national security experience, you've been had.
If on the other hand, Hillary was not making foreign policy or national security decisions during her husband's presidency, and was instead performing the normal duties of a first lady, then her claim to international stature and experience is based mostly on her meetings and liaisons with the wives of foreign leaders, and her activism on behalf of issues proscribed for her by the president (such as her trip to China for that international women's conference.) In that case, Hillary can claim no greater level of foreign policy expertise than, say, Angelina Jolie, who as a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. travels to foreign capitols to lobby on behalf of worthy causes. In fact, Jolie recently felt empowered enough as a foreign policy advocate to pen an op-ed piece on what the U.S. should do about Iraq. Based on HER foreign policy experience, would anyone in their right mind suggest that Angelina is qualified to pick up that phone at 3 a.m.?
I think not.
These are arguments I'm not gleeful about making. I have been a supporter of the Clintons since 1992, and I would have supported Hillary for president had Barack not been in the race and impressed me so thoroughly last year. But even I am questioning the basis for what would have been my pro-Hillary stance. Even as someone who thought that she rightly ran as Margaret Thatcher, on closer inspection, I have to admit that my admiration for her is based mostly on the successes of her husband's administration. Many voters, if they are honest with themselves, must admit the same thing. The idea of Hillary as better qualified is based, at least in part, on the promise that if she becomes president, Bill will be there to advise her on what to do after she picks up that phone. That's reality. Hillary's claim to decades of international experience is a media-enabled fantasy.
Barack has begun to make precisely this point -- one he has been too polite to bring up before. It's high time the media began to scrutinize Hillary's lofty claim, given that it forms the basis of her candidacy for president, and her claims to greater gravitas than her opponent.
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"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
