DANIEL GREENFIELD: IT IS NOT HER AGE…IT IS HER LACK OF EXPERIENCE
URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hillary-clintons-problem-isnt-age-its-experience/
The problem with Hillary Clinton’s candidacy isn’t that she would take office at the age of 69. An older and more mature president is not a bad thing. It’s how little she has done in that time.
After 2008, when Hillary was beaten by an even more inexperienced candidate, most people forgot just how little experience she has holding elected office.
Hillary Clinton only won one political office and she did so in her fifties. Despite winning two elections, her Senate career only covered the period from January 2001 to January 2009.
It’s more time than Obama spent in the Senate, but that’s not saying much.
JFK was considered young and inexperienced after spending 14 years in Congress. Hillary Clinton isn’t young, but her experience in elected office at the age of 69 will be less than his was at the age of 44.
Hillary’s supporters will argue that she has plenty of experience in public life. Unfortunately it’s the wrong kind of experience.
Like Elizabeth Warren, a slightly younger and more left-wing Hillary clone, she spent a good deal of time in the corrupt intersection between leftist non-profits, corporate boards and politically connected legal positions. The bad lessons those posts taught her are evident from Whitewater and HillaryCare.
Hillary Clinton embodies the corrupt culture of Washington D.C. whose cronyism and nepotism she has far too much experience with as the other half of a power couple notorious for personal and political corruption.
When they left, Bill and Hillary trailed illegal pardons and stolen property behind them. As recently as 2008, Bob Herbert of the New York Times wrote, “The Clintons should be ashamed of themselves. But they long ago proved to the world that they have no shame.”
Back in 2001, he had suggested that the Clintons might one day be “led away in handcuffs”.
That’s Hillary Clinton’s real experience and it’s not policy experience or foreign policy experience. It’s the politics of political corruption. Hillary Clinton’s track record doesn’t consist of policy achievements. It’s in the people she knows and owes favors to, the legion of corrupt associates of Clintonworld and the millionaires and billionaires who fund her unscrupulous political ambitions with their dirty money.
If Hillary’s last name were still Rodham, no one would have even proposed her for Senate. There is absolutely nothing in her record or her ideas that recommends her for higher office.
Not only is she inexperienced and inept, despite her many makeovers she is a colorless figure with the speaking style and fashion sense of a college registrar, and a bureaucrat’s cagey instinct for pre-emptive cover-ups that only make her look more suspicious even when she didn’t actually do anything wrong.
Hillary Clinton did nothing of note either as Senator or Secretary of State. The reason why her time in the Senate is remembered on the left for her Iraq War vote and her time as Secretary of State is remembered on the right for Benghazi is that there isn’t anything else to remember her for.
The high points of her national career are negative; terminated from Watergate after unethical behavior, a failure on government health care as First Lady, an Iraq War vote that she spent five years lying about and the abandonment of Americans in Benghazi as Secretary of State.
And a track record of trying to blame her decisions on everyone else.
Despite voting for the Iraq War, Hillary blamed Bush for a “rush to war” and for “triggering” the conflict. Few on the left have forgotten that she had even more positions on the Iraq War than John Kerry and that her positions changed completely based on what was going on in America and Iraq at the time.
When it came to Benghazi, other people took the fall for a horrifying failure that she claimed to be accepting responsibility for, while her own pet committee shifted the blame onto others.
Hillary Clinton accused Obama of being unready for a 3 A.M. phone call, but does anyone believe that she would take a 3 A.M. phone call and make a quick decision in a crisis? Is there anything in her track record in the Senate or as Secretary of State that suggests that she is bold and decisive?
Anything at all?
Hillary Clinton carefully avoided a track record. In the Senate, she invariably went with the least controversial position on every issue until she began overcompensating on Iraq to win back the left.
In the Senate, she was for a ban on flag burning, Cap and Trade, nuclear power, for Israel, for Palestine, for abortion, against abortion, for harsh criminal penalties, against harsh criminal penalties, for No Child Left Behind, against No Child Left Behind, for gay marriage, against gay marriage, for medical marijuana and against medical marijuana.
If the polls opposed gay marriage, she was against it. If the polls supported it, she was for it. The same went for everything else.
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton staked out a bold position in favor of visiting other countries and shaking hands with their leaders.
This is not a woman who takes 3 A.M. phone calls. Not without polling them first and issuing a non-definitive statement in the vaguest possible language that she can’t be held accountable for in any way.
This isn’t a record that speaks of experience. It’s the record of a woman working hard to avoid ever having an experience, a position or a conscience.
JFK came into the White House having seen combat and having come close to dying many times. He had spent almost a decade and a half in Congress and taken positions on important issues.
Hillary Clinton may be almost 70 at that same point, but without a fraction of his experience, and she has tried to make up for it with childish lies like claiming to have come under sniper fire in Bosnia, claiming to have negotiated open borders for refugees in Kosovo and claiming to have been instrumental in the Irish peace process.
It’s no wonder that the chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee in Watergate said of her, “She was a liar.”
Hillary’s experience is as imaginary as her work bringing peace to Northern Ireland. The issue isn’t her age; it’s her lack of principles and her lack of courage. Hillary Clinton compensates for a mediocre career of political cronyism with ridiculous lies in an act of neurotic insecurity.
Hillary Clinton isn’t too old to be president. She’s too adolescent, untried and immature. She has made too few decisions that matter, taken too few risks and even less responsibility and lives an imaginary Walter Mitty life of death-defying adventures that only exist in her mind and her press releases.
Hillary isn’t just incompetent, corrupt or a liar. Like too many of her peers, she’s a 66-year-old child.
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