By BRIAN TUMULTY
GANNETT NEWS SERVICE
(Original publication: September 30, 2007)
INDIANOLA, Iowa - When it comes to the issue of experience as a qualification to be president, many Democratic voters are passing over candidates with years of public service, including one who is a governor and former U.N. ambassador and another who is considered a leading expert on foreign policy in the Senate.
Instead, the mantle of experience is being credited to a former first lady because she's met with foreign leaders, helped her husband on policy issues and supported him against political attacks.
Polls show more than four in 10 voters nationwide - including Republicans and independents - give Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton the edge among the Democratic candidates on the issue of experience.
"She sat as close to the job as you can sit without doing it," said Bob Sweeney an assistant high school principal and undecided Democrat from Atlantic, Iowa.
"She's worked with foreign diplomats before," said Leanne Dell of Pella, Iowa, an uncommitted Democrat.
"Everybody pooh-poohed her talk of a vast right wing conspiracy," said Fred Noon, president of the Municipal Laborers Local 353 in Des Moines. "There absolutely was. It may not have been coordinated, but she and her husband have been the focus of a right wing slander campaign, and they handled it very well."
Her current job as a senator from New York has helped Clinton learn "how to deal with other senators," according to Mark Pape, an administrator for a county jail from Maquoketa, Iowa, who supports former Sen. John Edwards.
Still, others say it's more of a package that dates back to her days as first lady of Arkansas.
"I'd say life experience and her experience in the Senate. All of the above," said Sue Thielmann, a retired high school teacher from Muscatine, Iowa.
Sweeney, Dell, Pape, Noon and Thielmann are among Iowa Democrats being courted by the party's eight presidential candidates competing in caucuses this winter.
Christopher Hull, author of a new book on the Iowa presidential caucus who has worked for Republican lawmakers, credits Clinton's campaign with taking the issue of experience off the table by continuously promoting her as having experience.
"I think it is a triumph of message," said Hull, whose book is titled "Grassroots Rules: How the Iowa Caucus Helps Elect American Presidents." "What Hillary Clinton's campaign is doing, is saying a thing enough times that it makes it so."
Karen O'Connor, director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University, said Clinton was involved in policy issues from the start of her husband's administration.
"To some extent, it's almost like she was the vice president for eight years and is now running having been a vice president, if you will, as well as being in the Senate," O'Connor said.
Clinton's signature policy issue as first lady was as an advocate for universal health care in 1993-94, leading the development of a complex plan that ultimately failed to pass Congress.
But Clinton was vague at a New Hampshire debate Wednesday night about her role in foreign policy issues as first lady.
"I was certainly involved in talking about a lot of what went on in terms of the president's decisions. But I know very well that the president makes the decision. Everyone in the White House is there because of one person - the president - including the spouse of the president," she said. "What I believe is that it is the ultimate responsibility of a president to seek out a broad cross section of advisers who will have different points of view and provide different perspectives, and that's what I intend to do, and that is certainly what my husband did as well. "
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