Why Hillary Clinton's failures of leadership matter
Frank Rich has a brilliant and dead-on criticism of the Clinton campaign, especially its dubious claims of stronger experience.
A resume can't buy you love
"We can only imagine what is going on inside John McCain's head when he contemplates Mike Huckabee. It can't be pretty. No presidential candidate in either party has more experience in matters of war than the Arizona senator, and yet in a wartime election he is being outpaced by a guy who has zero experience and is proud of it.
'I may not be the expert that some people are on foreign policy," Huckabee joked to Don Imus, 'but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night.' So much for the gravitas points earned during a five-and-a-half year stay at the Hanoi Hilton.
But if McCain has so far resisted slapping down the upstart in his party, Bill Clinton has shown no such self-restraint about Barack Obama. Early this month the former president criticized the press for not sufficiently covering the candidates' "record in public life" and thereby making 'people think experience is irrelevant.' His pique boiled over on Charlie Rose's show on Dec. 14, when he made his now-famous claim that the 2008 election will be a referendum on whether 'no experience matters.' He insinuated that Obama was tantamount to 'a gifted television commentator' and likened a potential Obama presidency to a roll of the dice.
Attention Bill Clinton: If that's what this election is about, it's already over. No matter how much Hillary Clinton, McCain or Rudy Giuliani brag about being tested and vetted, it's not experience that will be decisive in determining the next president...
...But for Hillary Clinton, the problem isn't just that the Bush years have tarnished the notion that experience is a positive indicator of future performance. She has further devalued that sales pitch with her own inflated claims of what her experience has been.
Ted Sorensen, the JFK speechwriter now in the Obama camp, saw the backlash coming in a recent conversation I had with him after Hillary Clinton had mocked Obama for counting his elementary-school years in Indonesia as an asset.
"Hillary should be careful about scoffing at other people's experience," Sorensen said. "It's not as if the process of osmosis gives her presidential qualities by physical proximity."
Whatever Clinton's experience as first lady or senator, what matters most in any case is not its sheer volume, that 35 years she keeps citing. It's what she did or did not learn along the way that counts. That's why one of the most revealing debate passages so far came in an exchange that earned much laughter but scant scrutiny this month in Des Moines.
This was the moment when Obama was asked how he could deliver a clean break from the past while relying on "so many Clinton advisers." Hillary Clinton jokingly called out, "I want to hear that," prompting Obama to one-up her by responding, "Well, Hillary, I'm looking forward to you advising me, as well."
Well, touché. But what was left unexamined beneath the levity was a revealing distinction between these two candidates. The questioner was right: Obama, like Hillary Clinton, has indeed turned to former Clintonites for foreign-policy advice. But the Clinton players were not homogeneous, and who ended up with which '08 candidate is instructive.
The principal foreign-policy Clinton alumni in Obama's campaign include Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of state, and Tony Lake, the former national security adviser and a prewar skeptic who said publicly in February 2003 that the Bush administration had not made the case that Saddam was an "imminent threat." Rice, in an eloquent speech in November 2002, said that the Bush administration was "trying to change the subject to Iraq" from the war against Al Qaeda and warned that if it tried to fight both wars at once, "one, if not both, will suffer." Her text now reads as a bookend to Obama's senatorial campaign speech challenging the wisdom of the war only weeks earlier that same fall.
Hillary Clinton's current team was less prescient. Though it includes one of the earlier military critics of Bush policy, General Wesley Clark, he is balanced by General Jack Keane, an author of the Bush "surge." The Clinton campaign's foreign policy and national security director is a former Madeleine Albright aide, Lee Feinstein, who in November 2002 was gullible enough to say on CNBC that "we should take the president at his word, which is that he sees war as a last resort" - an argument anticipating the one Clinton still uses to defend her vote on the Iraq war authorization.
In late April 2003, a week before "Mission Accomplished," Feinstein could be found on CNN saying that he was "fairly confident" that WMD would turn up in Iraq. Asked if the war would be a failure if no weapons were found, he said, "I don't think that that's a situation we'll confront." Forced to confront exactly that situation over the next year, he dug in deeper, co-writing an essay for Foreign Affairs (available on its Web site) arguing that "the biggest problem with the Bush pre-emption strategy may be that it does not go far enough."
In a two-page handwritten letter in response to a recent column of mine criticizing Hillary Clinton's Senate votes on Iraq and Iran, Bill Clinton made a serious and impassioned defense of her foreign-policy record. On the subject of her support for the so-called Kyl-Lieberman amendment on Iran this fall, Bill Clinton wrote: "If Sen. Obama, for example, had really believed it was an indirect authorization to attack Iran, he would not have stayed away on the campaign trail, but would have come back to vote against it." That's a fair point - and a fair criticism of Obama as he continues to vilify this particular Hillary Clinton vote. If voting for Kyl-Lieberman was as grave a step toward war as Obama claims, there's no excuse for his absence.
Bill Clinton's narrow defense of his wife's Iraq vote in 2002 - it was not "a blanket authorization to go to war," he wrote - doesn't persuade me.
But even if it did, her choice for foreign-policy director in 2008 makes me question her ability to profit from experience and make a clean break with the establishment thinking in both parties that enabled the Iraq fiasco. Judgment calls like this rather than failures of the press may answer her husband's question as to why the public finds her experience "irrelevant."
What Hillary Clinton clearly has learned from her White House experience, as she reminds us, is to strike back at her critics.
Unfortunately, she has assimilated those critics' methods as well.
Attacks on Obama's record and views are fair game. But the steady personal attacks - the invocations of "cocaine" and "Hussein" and "madrassa" by surrogates - smell like the dirty tricks of the old Clinton haters. The Clinton-camp denials that these tactics have been "authorized" sound like Karl Rove's denials of similar smear campaigns against John McCain in 2000.
If Hillary Clinton is to win, she won't do so by running on that kind of experience but by rising above it. Bill Clinton wouldn't have shifted gears to refer to his wife constantly as a "change agent," however implausibly, if his acute political sensors didn't tell him that Americans are not just willing but eager to roll the dice."
A powerful and accurate criticism. The Clintons and their supporters better hope that the deception and less engaged thought in this campaign and as a political strategy by Hillary Clinton for almost 6 years, now, somehow doesn't matter to more honest, thoughtful, decent leadership. Something tells me they are wrong.
Thanks to Frank Rich for making more plain why it matters and who our better alternatives might be.
