Hillary Clinton’s “Ready on Day One” Myth Debunked
 
What happens when the principal justification for your campaign is exposed as nothing more than bravado? One by one, Hillary's fraudulent claims of her first-hand, substantive experience during her tenure in the White House as First Lady, are being exposed as untrue or wildly exaggerated.
First there was the debunking of her pivotal role in the Irish Peace Accords. Next, her assertion of being a key player in passing Children's Health Care legislation was ridiculed. With the recent release of her White House schedules, it is now abundantly clear that with the exception of her calamitous role in the Health Care Task Force (which helped Republicans secure a congressional majority in 1994) and her stellar performance as head of damage control during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, she was very much a bit player during the major events of her husband's administration.
Here is an event by event sampling from The Guardian that squares Hillary’s rhetoric with reality:
But documents from her first lady office threaten to undermine her claim to have played a major role in Clinton's foreign policy decisions. For instance, Clinton has said she helped negotiate the April 1998 Good Friday agreement between warring factions in Northern Ireland. But while Catholic and Protestant figures hashed out details of a power-sharing agreement in Belfast Clinton was at the National Press Club in Washington at a "Hats on Bella" party honouring Bella Abzug, a congresswoman from New York who had recently died. While President Clinton phoned major participants in the peace talks she met with Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and joined a farewell party for Democratic worker Karen Finney. The day the agreement was inked she met with Philippine first lady Amelita Ramos. When Nato launched air strikes against Serbia in an attempt to punish Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for the country's onslaught against ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo Clinton toured Egyptian ruins, including King Tut's tomb and the temple of Hatshepsut. She dined at the Temple of Luxor, and stayed overnight at the Sofitel Winter Palace Hotel there. Presidents of three Balkan states signed a peace agreement in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995, ending years of ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia. Clinton's file lists no public schedule for that day, but indicates she was in Washington. The documents released yesterday came in response to a conservative organisation's freedom of information request and subsequent lawsuit. The records include schedules from nearly 3,000 days Clinton was in the White House, and detail meetings, trips, speaking engagements and social activities. Bruce Lindsey, a Little Rock attorney and long time Clinton confidant, vetted the pages prior to their release. National archives staff checked the documents for information sensitive to national security and law enforcement matters. Nearly a third of the pages have redactions, most of which the archives said were made to protect the privacy of Clinton's associates. The redacted material includes home addresses, telephone numbers and social security numbers, the archives said. Christopher Farrell, director of investigations and research with Judicial Watch, the organisation behind the two-year-long legal effort to win the documents' release, said he doesn't anticipate finding any "smoking gun" within the reams of pages. He said Lindsey "has enormous discretion" to redact information potentially damaging to Clinton's White House bid. "My expectations are quite low." Hillary Clinton was present in the White House, however, for at least one significant event of the Clinton presidency. On November 15 1995, when President Clinton is said to have begun his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, she was in the White House, according to her schedule.
That's the bad news for Hillary. The good news is that it really doesn't matter, as her rival, when it comes to substantive experience, is even more of an empty suit than she.
 
Beacon Street Journal
Friday, March 21, 2008
By John Kinsellagh