Bill Clinton slams his opponent..err,wife's opponent Obama
>Bill Clinton Says He Was More Experienced Than Obama
By Kristin Jensen, bloomberg.com
Sept. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Former President Bill Clinton said he was far more experienced when he made his successful 1992 White House run than Senator Barack Obama is today.
``There is a difference,'' Clinton said in an interview with Bloomberg Television's ``Political Capital With Al Hunt'' that will air this weekend.
Clinton was 46 in 1992 when he beat Republican President George H.W. Bush to win the highest U.S. office, the same age that Obama is now. When Clinton, then the Arkansas governor, was first running, ``he was initially dismissed as an obscure if colorful outsider, handsome and articulate but, at age 46, too young and inexperienced for the job,'' his wife Hillary wrote in her autobiography, ``Living History.''
Today, New York Senator Hillary Clinton, 59, is the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination and her closest rival is Obama, a first-term U.S. senator from Illinois who previously served in the state legislature and worked as a community organizer in Chicago.
Hillary Clinton's campaign has emphasized her record as first lady and in the U.S. Senate as a way of highlighting Obama's relative lack of experience.
After a July 23 debate, her campaign put out a memo criticizing Obama for saying he would agree to meet with dictators without precondition in his first year in office. During the debate, Clinton said she would refuse to do so because such meetings could be used as propaganda.
``Hillary Clinton distinguished herself and showed that she has the strength and experience to be the next president,'' her campaign said. Clinton later told the Quad-City Times that Obama's comments were `irresponsible and frankly naive.''
Still, her husband's comments were the Clinton camp's most pointed and direct to date on Obama's level of experience.
Obama, for his part, has fashioned himself as the agent of change in the race, emphasizing in speeches that he hasn't adopted ``the ways of Washington.''
Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said today that his candidate has ``over two decades of the experience America needs.''
``He can change the divisive politics of Washington because he's the one candidate who's spent his career bringing people of differing views together,'' Burton said.
One of Obama's best-known supporters, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, in August dismissed the experience comparison, saying, ``Being a former first lady doesn't prepare you to be president.''
Bill Clinton, 61, said Obama's experience today is closer to his own in 1988, when he decided not to pursue a White House run. ``I came within a day of announcing, because most of the governors were for me and I had been a governor for six years,'' Clinton said in the interview taped in New York. ``And I really didn't think I knew enough and had served enough and done enough to run.''
Obama has the added difficulty that the international situation is more complicated today, with the threat of terrorism and the war in Iraq, than it was in 1992, Clinton said.
At that time, the most pressing international issue ``was how to build a post-Cold War world,'' he said. ``We didn't have the terror threat."
When he campaigns for his wife, Bill Clinton highlights her experience as a widely traveled first lady who focused on health- care policy during her husband's administration. |
