The New York Times takes a slice out of Hillary Clinton

The entire justification for Hillary Clinton's candidacy is her claim to having the experience to start off from Day One to lead the country. Apparently, living in the White House, advising her husband, and traveling as First Lady is enough to fill the bill. But the New York Times' Patrick Healy explodes this whole myth by trying to figure out what exactly her experience might have been. And he just doesn't find all that much extraordinary expertise from her eight years as First Lady.

Mrs. Clinton’s role in her most high-profile assignment as first lady, the failed health care initiative of the early 1990s, has been well documented. Yet little has been made public about her involvement in foreign policy and national security as first lady. Documents about her work remain classified at the National Archives. Mrs. Clinton has declined to divulge the private advice she gave her husband.

An interview with Mrs. Clinton, conversations with 35 Clinton administration officials and a review of books about her White House years suggest that she was more of a sounding board than a policy maker, who learned through osmosis rather than decision-making, and who grew gradually more comfortable with the use of military power.

Her time in the White House was a period of transition in foreign policy and national security, with the cold war over and the threat of Islamic terrorism still emerging. As a result, while in the White House, she was never fully a part of either the old school that had been focused on the Soviet Union and the possibility of nuclear war or the more recent strain of national security thinking defined by issues like nonstate threats and the proliferation of nuclear technology.

Associates from that time said that she was aware of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and what her husband has in recent years characterized as his intense focus on them, but that she made no aggressive independent effort to shape policy or gather information about the threat of terrorism.

Healy goes through all the foreign policy events and crises that Bill Clinton faced during his presidency. She disclaims all responsibility for some of the early foreign policy moves in the Clinton presidency such as Somalia, Haiti, or Rwanda. And he can't seem to find Hillary's contribution for any of it. Notably, she didn't have the security clearance to get the top level briefings that would have been necessary for her to have been in on the big decisions. Her role was as a sounding board and advisor, exactly what you'd expect for any wife. And she spoke out on human rights issues when she traveled abroad. But then so did other First Ladies but no one suggested that that qualified them for their own shot at the White House.