TIME: Hillary's Quandry on the Campaign: Will experience matter?

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TIME: Hillary's Quandry on the Campaign: Will experience matter?

Hillary's Quandry on the Campaign
Thursday, May. 10, 2007
By JOE KLEIN

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks during a fundraiser for her presidential campaign in New York on Monday, April 23, 2007.
(Brooks Kraft/Corbis for TIME)

...."I voted for you for Senate when I was living in New York. Why should I vote for you for President?" a young woman named Hillary Sinn asked in Council Bluffs. The candidate proceeded to unreel her r�sum�--the years of advocacy for children; the years working on education policy when "Bill" was Governor of Arkansas; the health-care, uh, experience in "Bill's" first term as President; the eight years in the White House; the 82 countries visited; the fact that she was "running as a woman but not only as a woman"; that she'd had extensive experience working across party lines in the Senate. "It was the experience that came through," Sinn said later when I asked if she was satisfied with the answer. "I'm feeling really excited about her. She seems incredibly effective."

And Clinton had failed to mention what may be her most important qualification for the job, a knowledge of national-security issues unmatched in the Democratic field. Yes, several other Dems--Biden, Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson--can match her on foreign policy, but Clinton's years on the Armed Services Committee have been well spent. I once asked a well-known general if there were any Democrats running for President who understood the way military leaders think, and he said, "You mean, aside from Hillary?"

Asked in Red Oak how she would disengage from Iraq, she gave a precise, nuanced and up-to-the-minute answer: Withdraw the troops from the areas of sectarian conflict like Baghdad, keep a small force fighting al-Qaeda in al-Anbar province, move some troops to the Turkish border, protect the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and other civilian facilities, maintain a special-operations capability. And then, instead of the usual lip service to training Iraqi forces, she said, "We may also leave some forces to help train the Iraqis if there seems a chance this Iraqi government will get any better. But I'm doubtful about that." Contrast that with, say, John Edwards, who seemed utterly lost when I asked him a similar question a few weeks ago, finally settling on the opposite of Clinton's position. "You'd probably have to leave combat troops in the areas where combat was the greatest," he said.

Clinton's national-security expertise should be no small advantage in an election that may well take place in the midst of a war. But it is likely to take a backseat to a more prominent question about experience--whether eight years as First Lady qualifies one to be President of the United States. And to a more cosmic experience-related question than that: whether, after 20 years of Bushes and Clintons in the White House, we want to keep trading our most precious office back and forth between these two extremely strange families. In fact, it's entirely possible that "experience" may be more of a disadvantage than an advantage in 2008.

There have been six elections in which control of the presidency has switched parties during the television age. In five of those six, starting with John F. Kennedy's victory over Richard Nixon in 1960, the less experienced candidate won....

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1619574,00.html?xid=site-cnn-partner