Perspective on Hillary's first lady experience

[CTLawGuy]

Hillary wants to criticize Obama for having "no experience?" When in that case she opens herself up for scrutiny on her "experience."

This is an interesting article:

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/27/6017/

What Hillary Hasn’t Done in Foreign Policy
by Jon Wiener

During the eight years Hillary was First Lady, she didn’t deal with terrorism, Osama bin Laden, or Al Qaeda.

She wasn’t a decision-maker on any of the other big foreign policy issues of her husband’s presidency: whether to send troops to Bosnia or Kosovo, whether to bomb terrorist bases in Afghanistan or suspected terrorist sites in the Sudan.

She didn’t deal with the problems in the CIA and other intelligence agencies. She didn’t work on nuclear proliferation. She did not deal with genocide in Rwanda.

When Bill Clinton brought Israelis and Palestinians to negotiations at Camp David in 2000, Hillary wasn’t there.

These are the conclusions reached by New York Times reporter Patrik Healy, who reported on Dec. 26 on his conversations with 35 Clinton administration officials and his interview with Hillary herself.

“Mrs. Clinton did not hold a security clearance,” Healy wrote. “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.”

Most important: Hillary did not do “the hard part of foreign policy” - “making tough decisions, responding to crises.” That’s what Susan Rice told the New York Times - she was a National Security Council senior aide and a State Department official during the Clinton administration. She’s now supporting Obama.

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more at link

[AtomicKitten]

1. Obama does lack First Lady experience.

Gobama.

[Deja Q]

5. Why? How many wives does he need to have in order to qualify?

:hide:

[AtomicKitten]

7. I suspect Romney knows the answer to your query.

;-)

[Vickers]

15. Har!

:thumbsup:

[Harper_is_Bush]

2. What's the point of this article? Hillary wasn't President before? Well duh. Insulting to our

intelligence.

[CTLawGuy]

3. someone should remind hillary

since she is basically saying just that...

[Harper_is_Bush]

4. Haven't heard that myself. I give her some credit for being FL for 8 years.

It's not without any merit.

[CTLawGuy]

6. yes she's done some things above and beyond FL

but she can't claim all of Bill's accomplishments as her own and then turn around and bash others on the experience issue.

[dkf]

8. Hillary has much of the first lady experience as Laura Bush.

In fact Laura Bush probably has more experience with foreign policy than Hillary because George Bush had more international blowups than Bill Clinton.

Which goes back to the fact that being "experienced" doesn't mean you are any good at it.

[Hieronymus]

9. Hillary never, in 8 years, asked for a security clearance. Bill could have

easily gotten her one.
She never sat in important meetings, for that reason.

[Azathoth]

10. Actually, I think it would have been wrong if he had gotten her a security clearance

She had no business having a security clearance. She wasn't a diplomat or a government official whose job responsibilities required access to classified information.

[Perry Logan]

11. And here is just a little of Hillary's vast experience...

HILLARY'S EXPERIENCE ON THE WORLD STAGE:

Her historic speech at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 not only galvanized women around the world, it helped spawn a movement that led to advances politically, legally, economically, and socially for women in many countries over the next decade. Among other initiatives, she spearheaded the Clinton Administration's efforts to combat the global crisis of human trafficking. She persuaded the First Ladies of the Americas to use their collective power to eradicate measles and improve girls' education throughout the western Hemisphere. And she is widely credited with helping women in Kuwait finally win the right to vote.

As First Lady and now as a two-term senator who represents the most ethnically diverse state in the nation and who sits on the Armed Services Committee, Hillary Clinton has become a fixture on international issues over the past 15 years. She has traveled to more than 80 countries, going from barrios to rural villages to meetings with heads of state. She has consulted with dozens of world leaders - Nelson Mandela, King Abdullah, Tony Blair among them -- on matters as diverse as America and NATO's roles in Kosovo, eradicating poverty in the Third World, and the plight of women living under the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Today, she is one of the most influential voices in the world on human rights, democracy, and the promotion of a "new internationalism" in foreign affairs that calls for a balanced use of military force, diplomacy, and social development to strengthen American interests and security globally.

While American First Ladies historically have made great (and often overlooked) contributions to our nation, Hillary Clinton's wide-ranging experience on international issues as First Lady is unprecedented. Indeed, she is the only First Lady to have delivered foreign policy addresses at major gatherings of the United Nations, the World Bank, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the World Economic Forum.

Hillary Clinton has been fighting for the rights of children for special needs for decades. In her first job out of law school working for the Children's Defense Fund, she conducted research that led to Congress passing the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, the landmark bill mandating that all children with disabilities be educated in the public school system. later, she helped improve the education of children with special needs by working to reauthorize the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act. In 2005, she sponsored an amendment to increase funding for the act by $4 billion dollars. She also cosponsored the Personal Excellence for Children with Disabilities Act, a bill that promised to help schools recruit and retain new special education teachers, and better prepare general education teachers and staff to work with children with special needs.

Most recently, she has called for greatly expanded funding to the National Institute for Health to investigate treatments for children with disabilities. And she has put forth a comprehensive and detailed plan to help children and families affected by autism, with numerous elements that correspond very closely to what families in the autism community have been demanding for years.

[Alamom]

12. Thanks Perry Logan. The American people know this & they remember..

That's what scares the other candidates.

[Alamom]

13. And where is the report of Obamas Foreign Policy experience by the NYT's, Patrik Healy or Susan

Rice. Surely, there is something besides living in a foreign country when he was a child.

[William769]

14. If we look up his elementary school records we will find his Foreign Policy experience.

[CTLawGuy]

16. If Obama were to start hypocritically attacking others on the

experience issue as Hillary has I'm sure we would see it.