White House Wife - The Experience Question

Hillary's claim to be uniquely qualified to be commander in chief rests in part on her characterizations of foreign policy and national security experience as first lady.

As the AP's Nancy Benac wrote recently, few will argue that she played an active role in her husband's administration. She set up an office in the West Wing and accompanied Bill on trips to 80 countries.

This hardly qualifies as "crisis management," however, suggested former Clinton assistant secretary of state and current Obama supporter Susan Rice.

"Making tough decisions, responding to crises, making the bureaucracy implement decisions that they may not want to implement — that’s the hard part of foreign policy," Rice told the NY Times in December 2007. "That’s not what Mrs. Clinton was asked or expected to do as first lady." To the AP she added "There is no crisis to be dealt with or managed when you are first lady."

Or, as Margaret Carlson put it on the March 6 MSNBC Hardball "She really did have tea and ... cookies in those countries."

In the December article the Times reported that during her two terms as first lady, Mrs. Clinton

... did not hold a security clearance. She did not attend National Security Council meetings. She was not given a copy of the president’s daily intelligence briefing.

During the period in 1998 when former president Bill Clinton was grappling with the decision of whether or not to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan, Hillary was barely speaking to her husband as the Lewinsky scandal unfolded.

Clinton claims she "helped bring peace to Northern Ireland." Belfast politician Brian Feeney thinks she overstated her role. ""The road to peace was carefully documented, and she wasn't on it," he said. Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of Northern Ireland called Clinton's claim a "wee bit silly."

"I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill going around," he said. Her recent statements about being deeply involved were merely "the sort of thing people put in their canvassing leaflets" during elections. "She visited when things were happening, saw what was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player."

Clinton also cites her participation in the 1995 U.N. Conference on Women in Beijing. Rice acknowledged that Hillary delivered an important speech on women's rights, but suggests that it can't be considered presidential crisis management experience, either.

In 1996 Hillary traveled to Bosnia, and has made much of the fact that it was a war zone. Actor Sinbad, who accompanied Clinton, daughter Chelsea, and singer Sheryl Crow on the trip has described it as a USO tour. The scariest part of the trip, wrote Sinbad, was wondering where he'd eat next.