Did Hillary Clinton run Bill's administration ?

"I am happy to compare my experience to hers when it comes to the economy," US Senator and Presidential aspirant Barack Obama said according to this report. "My understanding was she wasn't Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. I don't know exactly what experience she's claiming."

Obama was responding to the Hillary Clinton campaign’s repeated line that Obama does not measure up to Hillary Clinton in experience. He is right. Clinton can by rights claim no more experience in running government than her predecessor as first lady, Barbara Bush, and her successor, Laura Bush.

By my understanding of US politics, the wife of the President is required to play the role of a very traditional wife – redecorate the White House, host parties, finalize the guest list and the sitting arrangements, and generally look pretty and presentable.

If Hillary wants to suggest that she got experience running the government while she was First Lady, that appears to confirm what a lot of people say about her – that she was poking her nose in affairs of state while husband Bill chased other affairs.

Unless Hillary Clinton wants to suggest that she enjoyed power and profile beyond normally recommended for a President’s spouse, the only superior experience Hillary Clinton can talk about is knowing better stuff like the layout of the White House, which curtains go well with which carpets, and yes how to keep a check on an irrepressibly errant husband.

Perhaps Clinton is not referring to her years at the White House, but as a Senator from New York. One of Clinton’s best known decisions as Senator was to have signed an authorization of war against Iraq, and again signing the dotted line on Iran. If that is experience, Obama is head and shoulders above Hillary Clinton.

Among the Democratic front-runners Obama is campaigning on an anti-Washington anti-Establishment platform, while Clinton is campaigning as the “insider”, the person from within the Establishment, who got her experience as part of the Establishment.

Neither however shows great leadership, neither “ has a dream”, neither inspires confidence. One for being too naïve to want to overthrow the establishment at one go, the other because she is establishment, not by experience, but by affectation, by her belief that she is pre-destined to occupy the White House.

Unfortunately, at a time when Democrats seem to be best poised to win the White House, the party seems to only throw up a modern-day Don Quixote and a Lady Macbeth.

Al Gore wins Nobel; good to go for US presidency

Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and lay the foundations for counteracting it, according to an Associated Press report.

Meanwhile people claiming to be grass-roots Democrats plan to draft Gore to contest the Democratic nomination and eventually the US presidency. They have asked sympathizers to sign a petition to Al Gore on their web site called draftgore.com.

Going by his track record on Iraq and his leadership stand on environment issues, Al Gore may in fact give America a chance to play a leadership role worldwide, a leadership built on civic initiatives, rather than on the power of arms, that the country has been associated with under President George Bush.

In my opinion Al Gore has some advantages. One he is not a Clinton nor a Bush. If Gore gets elected as president of the US, it will prove that the country is not short of leaders outside the Bush and Clinton dynasties.

Gore may also help make the world a safer place.

Hillary Clinton voted authorizing the war in Iraq, and has now back-tracked with the naïve line that she didn’t know George Bush would mess it up. In contrast, Gore has criticized the invasion of Iraq as way back as 2002. On consistency he scores over Clinton, but he is on par with Barack Obama.

Gore however breaks from the pack of Presidential wannabes as he comes across as a man with a vision. His commitment to environment issues, and his active participation in a variety of forums on other serious issues like the role of the Internet, makes Gore clearly statesman material, unlike the rest who have yet to articulate a vision of what they stand for politically, socially, and on the environmental front.

Al Gore has so far shown no interest in running again for the Presidency. From his current position as a statesman, he would be getting into the rough and tumble of daily administration, bipartisan politics, and other challenges, including extricating the country out of Iraq and maybe Iran if Bush has already got there by January, 2009. His election is also by no means a foregone conclusion with Hillary Clinton once again aiming for the White House. She has raised cash and set up a campaign organization, that Gore may find tough, though not impossible to match at this point.

But if he changes his mind, he can perhaps help make the world both a safer and cleaner place.

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Alas, yet another Clinton presidency

Alas, yet another Clinton presidency

After a first flush of success, the downslide seems to have begun for Senator Barack Obama in his bid for the Democratic nomination. First was the news that the Senator had raised US$20 million in the third quarter, lower than $27 million for key rival Senator Hillary Clinton.

A new poll by Washington Post-ABC News this week suggests that Clinton has pulled away from the rest of the pack, with 53 percent of Democrats saying that they would vote for Clinton if a presidential caucus or primary was held in their state now. In contrast, only 20 percent of the Democrats polled said they would vote for Obama.

The poll, which has a three-point error margin, was conducted by telephone between September 27-30, among a random national sample of 1,114 adults, including additional interviews with randomly-selected African Americans, for a total of 212 black respondents.

With Obama well behind her in the poll, Clinton also seems to be quite a strong candidate to take on Rudy Giuliani, the strongest Republican contender so far. If the presidential elections were held now, 51 percent said they would vote for Clinton as against 43 percent for Giuliani.

With the Republicans with their back to the wall over Iraq, and President George Bush unlikely to come up with any imaginative resolution to the Iraq issue ahead of the elections, and probably compounding problems with an attack on Iran, the path to the presidency may be clear for Clinton.

Nostalgia for husband Bill Clinton seems to be pretty high with 66 percent in the poll approving of the way he handled his job as president. To be sure, Clinton presided over a period of relative domestic calm and economic expansion in the US.

Senator Clinton’s remarks about Obama’s lack of experience in politics may also have found their mark. Voters may have probably decided that being a first lady, and one known to nosy into matters of state, counts for political experience.

The interesting point is that neither Clinton nor Obama have outlined a clear strategy on how they would run foreign affairs, except for Obama saying he would talk to renegade leaders like the Iranian president, and Clinton saying she wouldn’t. Neither have proposed their specific plans for withdrawing troops from Iraq, and strategies for handling other hot spots, nor any dramatic moves in domestic policy.

Obama caught the imagination of the public for a while because he is not white, and also by his claim that he was the outsider who was going to clean up Washington of its shenanigans. Everybody loves change, particularly when it is Washington getting a makeover, but Obama has never been specific about the changes he would like to make. Just being an outsider didn’t help evidently.

The upshot is that it appears that America is terribly short of leadership outside of two families – the Bush and the Clinton family. We used to think that dynastic politics was something that happened in immature democracies in developing countries like India, and Sri Lanka. But it is now likely to happen in the US too, with a whole generation knowing only a Bush or a Clinton as president.

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