Grossly exaggerated Hillary experience claims

The focus of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign has been to stress her experience and readiness for the job.

The foreign policy coups she claims were just tourist visits that First Ladies frequently make. She did no heavy lifting, brought no peace to war-torn countries or brought warring nations together. Her trips to Northern Ireland, Rwanda and other places had her far removed from the action. While she was sipping tea and watching children's groups sing and dance, professional diplomats from the state department were behind the scenes, doing the actual work and bringing the actual results.

Hillary did take a much more engaged role in domestic policy as first lady, but it's hard to pinpoint any actual sucessess that were the result of her effort. The most famous disaster was her leadership in health care reform. Her grossly complicated socialist single payer plan was quickly shot down by both Congress and private insurers. It probably lead to the Republicans seizing control of both houses of Congress in the second half of hubby Bill's first term.

Most of Hillary's real experience has been her six years as a U.S. Senator from New York. It is hard to point to any significant legislation she crafted or sponsored that was enacted into law, but by all counts she did take seriously the role of congenial colleague, attending committee sessions and asking pertinent questions that showed she had studied her lessons. She was also a decent representative of her adopted state of New York, seeing that her staff did all the constituent work and bringing home the pork barrel spending expected of a big state liberal senator.

Obama has only done four years of senatorial bloviating, so in that sense he probably has less experience than Clinton. Chances are his eight years in the Illinois State Senate, despite 103 "present" votes where he didn't take a stand on controversial issues that might make him unpopular, do trump Hillary's 12 years as First Lady of Arkansas and eight years as First Lady of the United States.

Compared to McCain's 22 years in the U.S. Senate and four in the U.S. House, plus POW, Naval Academy and distinguished Navy career, neither Obama or Clinton stack up very well, experience-wise. You can bet the McCain strategists are sketching out the television spots right now, making that point.