"Watching your husband is not experience."

Great editorial from IBD yesterday.
An Empty Pantsuit

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, January 16, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election '08: If Hillary Clinton is proud of her experience and record of change, why are 2 million pages of her White House files locked up? Watching your husband is not experience.

The last time Sen. Clinton was a genuine agent of change was when she led the secretive Health Care Task Force in 1993-94 that labored mightily to propose a Godzilla-size bureaucracy that would have nationalized one-seventh of the nation's economy. To receive medical care you would have gone to the equivalent of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

That proposal was one of the key factors in the GOP tsunami of 1994. She helped Republicans gain control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. The universal health care she proposes now is virtually unchanged from her original dream of turning the U.S. into Canada.

After the health care debacle, Hillary slipped, or was pushed, below the radar. We don't know much about her "experience" as "co-president," largely because reams of calendars, memos and other records remain under seal until after this year's election.

We do know she has spent much of the past 35 years watching her husband. She watched him be attorney general of Arkansas, then governor, then president of the United States. She was in charge of putting down "bimbo eruptions" during her husband's 1992 presidential campaign. But again, that counts as watching her husband.

She would lead the war on terror, but her experience in that area lies in watching Bill fail to pull the trigger when he repeatedly had Osama bin Laden in his sights. On their watch, the U.S. did virtually nothing — except shamelessly withdraw from Somalia — while terrorists killed Americans on three continents.

Hillary did urge her husband to appoint Janet Reno as the first female attorney general, a move he'd later describe as "my worst mistake." While the Clinton Justice Department treated the first attack on the World Trade Center as a law enforcement matter, Reno kept busy incinerating religious zealots in Waco.

Hillary has been in the Senate for seven years, during which time she has accomplished nothing of note except for voting for the Iraq War before she was against it. No major piece of legislation bears her name.

Her public record and career is even spottier and shorter than that of her opponent, Sen. Barack Obama. He's been in public service for 11 years, including eight in the Illinois Senate before becoming the state's junior U.S. senator. She's made a lot of speeches, but has governed nowhere at any level and has led no major organizations.

Her possible GOP opponents have experienced and accomplished much more than the author of "It Takes a Village."

Mitt Romney has run an Olympic Games, been a successful businessman and served as governor of the blue state of Massachusetts. Sen. John McCain once led the largest squadron in the U.S. Navy and has actually gotten legislation passed in a long and distinguished Senate career. He speaks with moral authority on both terror and torture. Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York City during a time of crisis in our nation's history.

But, hey, Hillary did manage to turn $1,000 into a $100,000 windfall in the cattle futures market, didn't she? What other candidate has done that?