Clinton: McCain Has More Experience Than Obama

Hillary Clinton continued her heated attacks against frontrunner Obama, claiming that the likely Repubican nominee John McCain has more experience than the Illinois senator. Hillary told reporters yesterday:

"I think that I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002."

Keith Olbermann was less than pleased with the attack that would surely return in a McCain-Obama general election, calling the statement, "unbelievable."

Comments

[Mickiboop]

About the Experience Issue - LET'S COMPARE QUALIFICATIONS! Feb 14th, 2008 at 9:33 am EST

Let's take a closer look at who's really qualified and or who's really working for the good of all of us in the Senate. Obama or Clinton. Records of these two candidates should be scrutinized in order to make an informed decision. Senator Clinton, who has served only one full term - 6yrs. - and another year campaigning, has managed to author and pass into law - 20 twenty pieces of legislation in her first six years. These bills can be found on the website of the Library of Congress www.thomas.loc.gov, but to save you trouble, I'll post them here for you.

> 1. Establish the Kate Mullany National Historic Site.
> 2. Support the goals and ideals of Better Hearing and Speech Month.
> 3. Recognize the Ellis Island Medal of Honor.
> 4. Name courthouse after Thurgood Marshall.
> 5. Name courthouse after James L. Watson.
> 6. Name post office after Jonn A. O'Shea.
> 7. Designate Aug. 7, 2003, as National Purple Heart Recognition Day.
> 8. Support the goals and ideals of National Purple Heart Recognition Day.
> 9. Honor the life and legacy of Alexander Hamilton on the bicentennial of his death.
> 10. Congratulate the Syracuse Univ. Orange Men's Lacrosse Team on winning the championship.
> 11. Congratulate the Le Moyne College Dolphins Men's Lacrosse Team on winning the championship.
> 12. Establish the 225th Anniversary of the American Revolution Commemorative Program.
> 13. Name post office after Sergeant Riayan A. Tejeda.
> 14. Honor Shirley Chisholm for her service to the nation and express condolences on her death.
> 15. Honor John J. Downing, Brian Fahey, and Harry Ford, firefighters who lost their lives on duty. Only five of Clinton's bills are, more substantive.
>16. Extend period of unemployment assistance to victims of 9/11.
> 17. Pay for city projects in response to 9/11 18. Assist landmine victims in other countries.
> 19. Assist family caregivers in accessing affordable respite care.
> 20. Designate part of the National Forest System in Puerto Rico as protected in the wilderness preservation system.

There you have it, the fact's straight from the Senate Record. Now, I would post those of Obama's, but the list is too substantive, so I'll mainly categorize. During the first - 8 - eight years of his elected service he sponsored over 820 bills. He introduced 233 regarding healthcare reform:

> 125 on poverty and public assistance,
> 112 crime fighting bills,
> 97 economic bills,
> 60 human rights and anti-discrimination bills,
> 21 ethics reform bills,
> 15 gun control,
> 6 veterans affairs and many others.

His first year in the U.S. Senate, he authored 152 bills and co-sponsored another 427. These inculded:

**the Coburn-Obama Government Transparency Act of 2006 - became law,

**The Lugar-Obama Nuclear Non-proliferation and Conventional Weapons Threat
Reduction Act, - became law,

**The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, passed the Senate, **The 2007
Government Ethics Bill, - became law,

**The Protection Against Excessive Executive Compensation Bill, In committee, and many more. In all, since entering the U.S. Senate, Senator Obama has written 890 bills and co-sponsored another 1096. An impressive record, for someone who supposedly has no record according to some who would prefer that this comparison not be made public.

He's not just a talker....­......He's a doer. Pass it on....It's impressive!!!!!

[sophiamd]

Mickiboop. How convenient of you to present totally lopsided facts and trying to mislead the blogosphere.

I see you are posting the same thing on every blog you can go on. You posted this same thing on another blog. theroot.com, I believe.

You forgot to mention: Obama has only passed ONE piece of legislation in the senate.
Obama has missed MORE votes (207) in his 3 years in the Senate than Hillary (181) has in her entire 7 years.

You forgot to mention: that all of Obama's accomplishments in the IL Senate were during his last year in the IL Senate. During his first 6 years, NOTHING got passed b/c of Repub governor and Repub controlled IL legislature. Only when he was taken under the wing by IL Senate leader Emil Jones Jr. did he pass a bunch of legislation in his LAST year

Hillary has sponsored 356 bills and co-sponsored 1733. (i could list all the topics, but that would be too many)

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/person.xpd?id=300022

you want a do-er. Vote for Hillary.
see my blogs
Meritocracy
http://tinyurl.com/2xlfan

Actions not Words
http://tinyurl.com/ynn2zk

[blackwell98]

Election Fraud Against Obama In Ohio: More Comes Out
http://isaacs.newsvine.com/_news/2008/03/06/1348806-election-fraud-against-obama-in-ohio-more-comes-out

[hillarysupporter]

McCain does have more experience than Obama. Unfortunately, McCain is a hot-head, and not particularly bright, worse than Bush. McCain is the Last person you'd want answering that phone at 3:00 a.m.

[DeanLowe]

Is Keith that hard headed?
How can a guy older than God not have more experience then a guy in his 40s?
Calm down Keith, and stop talking to Chris Mathews.

[EuroRant1]

The moment there is suspicion about a person's motives, everything he does becomes tainted.
- Mahatma Gandhi

[supadindi]

From the AP: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1720720,00.html

(WASHINGTON) — To hear Hillary Rodham Clinton tell it now, she had a lot more going on as first lady than she let on at the time.

On the presidential campaign trail, Clinton frequently makes the pitch that she is uniquely qualified to pass the "commander in chief" test in large part because of her foreign policy and national security experience in Bill Clinton's White House.

She takes credit for helping bring peace to Northern Ireland, negotiating open borders for refugees fleeing Kosovo, standing up to the Chinese government over women's rights, and flying into Bosnia when it was too dangerous to send the president.

There is little doubt that Clinton was an exceptionally activist first lady. She was the first to set up shop in a West Wing office alongside other White House policymakers, and immediately was in the thick of domestic policy deliberations, most notably her long and unsuccessful fight for health care reform.

Clinton also took a keen interest in foreign policy, traveling to more than 80 countries, with her husband and alone, to promote U.S. policy and the cause of women and children.

But Clinton is taking credit for accomplishing more than some of those who were active in foreign policy during the Clinton years recall.

Former Clinton administration officials, many of them now aligned with either Clinton or Democratic presidential rival Barack Obama, offer differing views on the extent of her influence — and its relevance to the presidential race.

"Her experience speaks for itself," says former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who is advising Clinton's campaign. She wasn't the one making the final decisions on U.S. policy, he says, but "no one in the world got a better idea of the countervailing pressures. The most important decision a president can make is to send Americans into harm's way. She knows what that entails."

A contrary view comes from Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of state from the Clinton years and an Obama campaign adviser. She said Clinton's involvement with foreign policy as first lady was "laudable and important, but it is hardly the same thing as the kind of crisis management" that is required of a president. "There is no crisis to be dealt with or managed when you are first lady," Rice said.

A look at some of Clinton's specific foreign policy claims:

—NORTHERN IRELAND: "I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland."

Clinton traveled to Northern Ireland five times as first lady, and was a tireless advocate for the peace process. But she was not directly involved in negotiating the Good Friday peace accord.

She did encourage Irish women on both sides of the conflict to come together and get involved in a process that was dominated by men.

Former Democratic Sen. George Mitchell, who brokered the peace accord, said Clinton was "quite helpful."

"She became quite active in encouraging women in Northern Ireland to engage in the political process and in the peace process, and ultimately the role of women was important in moving the process forward," said Mitchell, who is neutral in the presidential race. "She was one of many people who participated in encouraging women to get involved, not the only one."

John Hume, the Catholic leader who shared the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the peace accord, credits Clinton for playing a "pivotal role" in the peace process.

But others in Northern Ireland say Clinton overstates her role.

"The road to peace was carefully documented, and she wasn't on it," says Brian Feeney, an author and former leading Belfast politician from the same party as Hume.

KOSOVO: "I negotiated open borders to let fleeing refugees into safety from Kosovo."

At the urging of the Macedonian government, Clinton in May 1999 traveled to Macedonia, which was being inundated with Albanian refugees from Kosovo. She visited a huge refugee camp, held hands with children, told their parents they would go home and announced business loans for the country to help its laggard economy cope with the refugee influx.

On May 5, Macedonian officials had shut the border to refugees, blaming the West for allowing more than a quarter-million people to overwhelm the country. Despite later government insistence that the border was open again, Serb soldiers appeared to be blocking refugees' exit, and only a trickle passed through on May 13, the day before Clinton arrived, according to an AP story written at the time. Refugees were reported to be afraid even to attempt the crossing.

Melanne Verveer, a Clinton aide who accompanied the first lady on the trip to Macedonia, said that only a small section of the border was open when she arrived, and that there was no guarantee it wouldn't close again at any time.

Verveer, who sat in on May 14 meetings between the first lady and Macedonia's president and prime minister, said Clinton was forceful in urging the leaders to keep the border open, and in assuring the Macedonians that the U.S. would support them in coping with the influx of refugees.

"What she did there I don't think can be underestimated in terms of the positive impact that it had," said Verveer, who is active in Clinton's campaign.

Robert Gelbard, who was presidential envoy to the Balkans at the time and now serves as an adviser to the Obama campaign, offers an opposing view.

"I cannot recall any involvement by Senator Clinton in this issue," he said. "The person who was able to get the border opened was Mrs. Sadako Ogata," the U.N. high commissioner for refugees. Gelbard said he had questioned other U.S. officials directly involved and none remembered involvement by Clinton.

There were no public reports at the time of Clinton negotiating to keep the border open.

Overall, said Gelbard, "She had more of a role on some foreign policy issues than a lot of other first ladies, including, for example, the current one. My own firsthand experience, though, is that her role was limited and I've been surprised at the claims that she had a much greater role than certainly I'm aware of on the issues I was working on."

SERBIA: "I urged him to bomb."

Clinton doesn't bring this one up now, but in a 1999 interview published in Talk magazine, the first lady was quoted as saying that she had urged her husband to recommend a NATO bombing campaign on Serb targets to halt ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. According to the story, Clinton called the president on March 21, 1999, from her travels in North Africa. "I urged him to bomb," she was quoted as saying. "You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?" NATO airstrikes began March 24.

Clinton generally refuses to talk about the private advice she gave her husband. But Holbrooke this week recalled a time during the subsequent NATO bombing campaign when he and his wife were invited upstairs at the White House after a social event. He said Hillary Clinton was a big participant in an hour-long discussion about the bombing, the possible use of ground troops and other matters.

She didn't take sides in the conversation, Holbrooke said, "but I have no doubt that she continued the conversation in the privacy of their relationship" and made her views clear.

CHINA: "I've been standing up to the Chinese government over women's rights."

Clinton says her participation on the U.N. Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 was "one of the highlights of my own life." There had been a huge debate over whether she should even go, with some human rights advocates expressing concern that China would use the conference as a public relations tool.

Clinton got strong reviews for threading the diplomatic needle with an impassioned speech that contained a wide-ranging denunciation of human rights abuses worldwide. She criticized China, without naming it directly, for the practice of sterilization and forced abortion, and for preventing many women from attending or participating fully in the conference.

In her memoir, Clinton writes about the rousing reception her speech received at the conference and adds, "What I didn't know at the time was that my 21-minute speech would become a manifesto for women all over the world. To this day, whenever I travel overseas, women come up to me quoting words from the Beijing speech or clutching copies they want me to autograph."

Rice, the former Clinton administration official now supporting Obama, credits the first lady for delivering an important speech on women's rights, but says that that doesn't translate into presidential crisis management credentials.

BOSNIA: "If the place was too small, too dangerous or too poor, send Hillary."

Clinton cites her March 1996 trip to Bosnia as an example of traveling into a war zone to promote U.S. policy, recalling a harrowing "corkscrew" landing during which she and her daughter, Chelsea, were ordered into the armored front of the plane to protect them against possible ground fire. She jokes that one mantra around the Clinton White House, was that "if the place was too small, too dangerous or too poor, send Hillary."

Clinton brought up the trip to counter Obama's suggestion that her experiences as first lady amounted to having tea at an ambassador's house.

"I don't remember anyone offering me tea," Clinton said of the Bosnia visit.

Security was very tight on Clinton's goodwill tour to Bosnia, but officials said at the time that she took no extraordinary risks.

Rice, the Obama supporter, dismissed the trip as a "meet and greet." She stressed that comedian Sinbad and singer Sheryl Crow accompanied Clinton on the flight to put on a USO show for the troops.

[txshldm0007]

QUEEN CLINTON has NO Clothes !!!

NO White House experience to be useful for antything

NO Foreign Affairs experience as it has been proven already

NO Vote record to be proud of, other than flip flopping

NO CLOTHES !!!!

[Plowboy]

Well, McCain is much older,so he has been around longer. That probably means that he has had more experience -- of some kind. I'm older than McCain, so I have even more experience. But there is experience and experience.And sometimes we learn from our experience -- and sometimes we don't. Now, it is true also that Hillary Clinton has had experience, but looking at her vote for war on Iraq, her vote for Kyl-Lieberman and more war, I can't see where that experience has done her a lot of good. Poor dumb me! I knew she was wrong from the start. Perhaps I learn better just by observing than she does by her --- more experience. That should warn us off from her. If she doesn't learn from experience, it is of no use. If she hasn't been learning, perhaps we should conclude that she isn't too good at learning.
She will probably keep getting it wrong.

[Independent voter]

You have to think like hillary to understand this deal.

It would rather have McCain win the presidency than Obama - because it can try again in 4 years if McCain wins.

If Obama wins it would be 8 years before it could realistically run again - and that's getting a little long in the tooth for the old biddy

[sherievotes]

Is Hillary Clinton trying to hedge her bets and become McCain's running mate if it doesn't work out for her on the Democratic side?

She is without standards. She says Obama is unprepared to deal with foreign issues and at the same time lays out the possibility of running with him. She thinks that the American people are idiots.

Let's prove her wrong.

[sarainitaly]

So, what exactly is so wrong about saying something that is true about mccain?

and is that so bad? i mean, john kerry is a huge obama supporter, and john kerry asked john mccain to be his running mate in 2004. obviously mccain has qualities that democrats like/respect.

so, if kerry is so fond of mccain, and so fond of obama, where is the outrage there?

[MikeMidCity]

Earth to sarainitaly ...... WTF are you talking aboot?

Gee whizz see what happens when monkeys type.

[sarainitaly]

ummm mike, fo. how about trying to reply, instead of just teh typical obama supporter insults. are you deying what i said? did you forget kerry asked mccain to be his running mate? do you not know what to say now, because you realized i am right?

poor little obamatron.

[Goldie9]

Any true Dem knows that McCain is not the one to promote as having the right "experience" to be the next president! What an idiot thing for Hillary to say! For one thing, Hillary is equating the number of years serving in Washington as being the only criteria to be considered for the job. How about considering the best interests of America and not the number of years in Washington?

And besides, Hillary herself would not even be in Washington right now if she was not married to Bill! Do you Hillary-supporters really believe that Hillary would have been elected a US Senator from NY, without any elected experience at all up to that point, without having been married to Bill? Well???

At least Obama has not had to use his marriage as a vehicle for getting himself elected to the US Senate!

[FZliveson]

Experience is only part of the package. What else is?:
Morality
Creativity
Heart
Selflessness
Gut-feeling
Past performance
Character
Credibility
Courage
Creativeness
Independence
For Hillary to pretend that she is more qualified to be commander in chief of our military because she ostensibly slept in close proximity to one of the sleaziest presidents our nation ever had is not experience I find attractive at all. Just because she had tea with Maggie Thatcher and was around when Bill bombed the shit out of Kosovo (http://www.fff.org/freedom/0101e.asp) and this makes him no different than Dubya. Just because Hillary has had the experience of speaking to the widow of Rajiv Gandhi doesn't make her more qualified to negotiate nuclear arms detente between Pakistan and India.

There is a ton of neurolinguistic programming going on in this campaign. Karl Rove is the expert. Bill Clinton didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday. I don't want a person in the White House who has vicarious experience and a nefarious character. We need someone who follows his/her religious teachings and who loves his neighbor and seeks peace and justice before righteousness.

McCain was a brown-shoe jet jockey...who lost 5 aircraft in the process. He was a victim of circumstance, not a hero. McCain was and still is a survivor...but that does not qualify him to be president. His experience just means...he's been around. Idi Amin, Adolph Hitler, Ceaucescu, Mussolini, Mao Tse Tung, Stalin, Lennin, Castro and now Norriega...they all been around too.
Experience means squat unless it is a catalyst to doing good for humanity and our nation.
Hillary's experience means squat to me...in fact it is a negative.

[Plowboy]

Why is she buttering the Republicans up with praise for McCain? Well, there are the open Democratic caucus in Wyoming and the open Mississippi primary coming up. And Bill has appeared with Rush Limbaugh for some reason.
Could it be a big plea for Republican spoiler votes?
In Texas Rush delivered those dittoheads; there were 20 counnties without a single voter in the Republican primary;/.the Republicans were voting in the Democrastic primary -- for Hillary who won those counties by a landslide. That gave her the slim over all victory in the primary.

On to Wyoming and Mississippi.

Now in Iowa, she belittled Mississippi, but now we suppose everyone has forgotten all that and she's telling them how she is always there just for them.

Bless her little heart.

And soon she'll be singinmg a new song for Pennsylvania! She's versatile, that lady. Very versatile!

[enoughalready]

Hillary's scorched earth campaign is going to lose this campaign for any Democrat. She seems to think she alone will come out ahead. It can all turn on her. Olbermann is correct on this one. This comment hurts all Democrats!

[AF2]

My husband and I used to love Keith Olbermann, but can longer stomach his show. He has lost complete objectivity when it comes to Obama and has lost all credibility as a journalist. He should nominate himself as his show's "Today's Worst Person in the World."