The truth about Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy "experience"

Finally the Obama campaign is starting to hit back at Hillary’s preposterous overstatements about her foreign policy experience. The media has been guilty of giving her a free pass on this issue, hopefully the memo released today by Greg Craig (Former Director of the Policy Planning Office at the State Department) will inspire the media to take a closer look at her foreign policy claims.

I want to be clear that I am not arguing Obama has as much foreign policy experience as Hillary Clinton. But he isn’t guilty of (1) being casual with the truth and (2) trying to overplay a card that would surely be trumped by McCain in the fall. Clinton is guilty on both counts.

The Craig memo begins: “When your entire campaign is based upon a claim of experience, it is important that you have evidence to support that claim. Hillary Clinton’s argument that she has passed “the Commander- in-Chief test” is simply not supported by her record.”

Here’s the section most likely to be quoted at length:

“There is no reason to believe, however, that she was a key player in
foreign policy at any time during the Clinton Administration. She did not sit in
on National Security Council meetings. She did not have a security clearance.
She did not attend meetings in the Situation Room. She did not manage any part
of the national security bureaucracy, nor did she have her own national security
staff. She did not do any heavy-lifting with foreign governments, whether they
were friendly or not. She never managed a foreign policy crisis, and there is no
evidence to suggest that she participated in the decision-making that occurred
in connection with any such crisis. As far as the record shows, Senator Clinton
never answered the phone either to make a decision on any pressing national
security issue – not at 3 AM or at any other time of day.”

Craig then refutes her exaggerated claims about Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, and China.

The first ‘graph of the conclusion nails it:

“The Clinton campaign’s argument is nothing more than mere assertion, dramatized in a scary television commercial with a telephone ringing in the middle of the night. There is no support for or substance in the claim that Senator Clinton has passed “the Commander-in-Chief test.” That claim – as the TV ad – consists of nothing more than making the assertion, repeating it frequently to the voters and hoping that they will believe it.”