The Qualifications of Hillary W. Clinton
barnett, dean
The Qualifi cations of Hillary W. Clinton A dynasty in decline. BY DEAN BARNETT According to the Clinton campaign’s narrative of choice, Senator Clinton is the most sensible choice for...
...If you research her position papers, you’ll fi nd nothing noteworthy or unique...
...How will we win in November 2008...
...One would also have to believe that Bill and Hillary worked hand in hand even when Bill’s extracurricular activities troubled their marriage...
...American soldiers based in Bosnia offered a starkly different view of Tuzla, the site of Hillary’s (not to mention Sinbad’s and Sheryl Crow’s) heroics...
...And yet Republicans somehow resisted the urge to anoint Nancy Reagan as their savior...
...BY DEAN BARNETT According to the Clinton campaign’s narrative of choice, Senator Clinton is the most sensible choice for president because of her “experience...
...On Thursday night, Iowans acknowledged the patent hollowness of Senator Clinton’s campaign by rebuking her with an embarrassing third-place fi nish...
...Left unanswered is the nagging question of who would have cared if she had “asserted herself...
...If she has any exceptional insights or creative policy ideas, she has yet to unveil them...
...The emptiness of her campaign was never more apparent...
...When the younger Bush hit the national scene, the only thing that distinguished him from dozens of Republicans who were more qualifi ed on paper for the presidency was his surname...
...It was never more obvious that the House of Clinton’s hour had passed...
...Senator Clinton claimed the trip took place in 1995, but White House records indicate her two visits to Bosnia occurred in 1996 and 1997...
...Since even in her own telling, Senator Clinton’s adventure had all the accoutrements of a goodwill tour, how precisely did this trip differ from a typical activity of any fi rst lady...
...Of course, there was always something audaciously disingenuous about Senator Clinton’s claims to “experience...
...Some in the conservative blogosphere took the trouble to fact-check the candidate’s account of her dangerous voyage and found the story, like many other things related to the Clintons, to be factually defi cient...
...And then there’s the fi nal question that one would imagine preoccupies liberal Clinton supporters: Hillary Clinton sat in the Senate when her colleagues debated the Iraq war resolution...
...Bush brought nothing special to the party...
...Indeed, one could plausibly argue that a different fi rst lady of recent vintage, Nancy Reagan, had much more “experience” in running the executive branch than Senator Clinton did...
...Her time in the Senate has been either undistinguished or ignominious, depending on your viewpoint...
...Hillary Clinton has but one rightful claim to the presidency—her last name...
...But arguing over the veracity of the story misses the point...
...Only the unusually credulous would accept the notion that Hillary Clinton’s time in the White House gave her much more “experience” than that afforded the typical fi rst lady...
...their relationship was a uniquely close partnership...
...In her time as first lady, Hillary Clinton didn’t hold a security clearance...
...Her claims to “experience” crumble at anything more than a cursory inquiry...
...To buy the senator’s story, one would have to believe the Clintons’ for-public-consumption narrative that Dean Barnett is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The “experience” that separates Hillary from the pack is her time in the White House, where she purportedly served as some sort of co-president/ consigliere to her husband...
...Not surprisingly, her account didn’t square with offi cial White House records or the actual situation in Bosnia...
...Her supporters would probably blame her virtual invisibility in the Senate on her lack of seniority...
...How has her experience benefi ted her...
...According to the Times’s strange formulation, “She did not assert herself on the crises in Somalia, Haiti and Rwanda...
...Madeleine Albright mourned immediately behind her...
...And yet Senator Clinton, in spite of all the benefi ts that her eight years of serving as co-president provided, blew the big one...
...Yet other junior senators like Tom Coburn have infl uence in the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body...
...As she delivered these meaningless comments, assorted relics from the 1990s hovered like ghostly apparitions...
...She supported the Iraq war...
...As frankness has always been something of a Clinton trademark, she should embrace the single distinguishing rationale for her candidacy—the illusory comfort that a dynasty provides...
...Even for liberals who swallow hook, line, and sinker the bait of Hillary’s “experience,” some disturbing questions remain...
...So one must wonder, What exactly is the rationale that supports Hillary Clinton’s candidacy...
...That politician is none other than George W. Bush...
...Other than that magic name...
...On December 26, the New York Times published a lengthy article that gave the lie to such claims...
...And his surname made him the frontrunner...
...By nominating a candidate who will be able to go the distance and who will be the best president on Day One...
...Among those accompanying the fi rst lady on this daring errand were singer Sheryl Crow, the comedian Sinbad, and fi rst daughter Chelsea...
...It went on and on, and was fi lled with empty, awkwardly worded platitudes: What is most important now is that, as we go on with this contest, that we keep focused on the two big issues, that we answer correctly the questions that each of us has posed...
...And to her left stood the former president...
...The Clinton campaign tried to strike back by insisting that her tenure in the White House featured some serious business...
...In this regard, she is much like another modern politician, one whom liberals tend to dislike with some passion...
...As a true lefty would tell it, some senators like Russ Feingold saw through the farrago of administration lies and CIA incompetence...
...She also lacks the political talents that distinguish her principal Democratic rivals...
...As the New York Times’s Adam Nagourney aptly put it, President Clinton’s “face [was] frozen in a smile...
...The myth that she served as co-president is transparently bogus...
...Senator Clinton should ditch the claim that she somehow has special qualifi cations for the presidency...
...Hillary’s impact in the Senate has been negligible...
...And yet some Democrats consider her the safe, predictable choice...
...She didn’t attend National Security Council meetings...
...To her right stood a beaming but ashen Wes Clark...
...Its current leader stood in defeat, quite literally eight years into her presidential campaign, and still had nothing to say that didn’t predate the current millennium...
...And to signal this candid new tack, she should change her middle name from “Rodham” to “W...
...But she, too, has a magic surname...
...This “experience” obviously doesn’t refer to her single full Senate term—even John Edwards has one of those...
...Despite her penchant for leadership, Senator Clinton reliably relegated herself to the sidelines whenever an important Iraq-related matter arose in the Senate...
...The same can be said of Hillary Clinton...
...Nonetheless, the senator, like a true political warhorse, greeted the setback with a strange “victory” speech...
...The candidate herself highlighted a perilous goodwill mission to Bosnia in which her airplane had to make a harrowing corkscrew landing to avoid danger...
...The soldiers referred to Tuzla as “Disneyland” because it was so safe and so starkly different from surrounding areas...
Vol. 13 • January 2008 • No. 17
