The Experience Straw Man and Hillary's Turn to the Dark Side

Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain have repeatedly hit Barack Obama over his supposed lack of experience. Sen. Clinton’s campaign highlighted this stance of their attack (which has turned singularly ugly and dishonorable) in a silly, but apparently effective, 3:00 am advertisement. Obama is all talk and no action, they say, he’s a novice, and he will freeze or not know what to do when push comes to shove. But let’s face it, Obama is 46 years old; he may not yet be a wizened sage, but he is no spring chicken either.

While Sen. Clinton derides his lack of experience, Obama has in fact been an elected official for far longer than Sen. Clinton has.

Here’s a rundown of Obama’s experience:

Obama received his Bachelor of Arts in 1983 from Columbia University. After a brief stint in New York, me moved to Chicago to take a job as a community organizer. As Director of the Developing Communities Project (a management job – hello!), Obama worked with low-income residents.

Obama entered Harvard Law School in 1988 and graduated in 1991.
He returned to Chicago and spent two years working on voter registration. In 1993, he joined the law firm Miner Barnhill & Galland, where he continued his career working at the community level, representing community organizers, discrimination claims, and (of course) voting rights cases.
On a parallel track, in 1993, Obama also became a lecturer of constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. He taught constitutional law for about ten years, until his election to the United States Senate in 2004.
Obama ran for, and was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996. He was reelected in 1998 and 2002. In January 2003, Obama became chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee when Democrats, after a decade in the minority, regained a majority in the Illinois Senate.
Obama was elected to the United States Senate in November 2004, and has been there since that date.

So, that’s five years as a community organizer dealing with voting rights, three years as an associate at a big law firm, ten years as a constitutional law professor, and twelve years now as an elected official. Based on Hillarymath, Obama has twenty-two years of experience!

John McCain has more years as an elected official, and Hillary Clinton has less.

Despite the fact that Obama actually has a significant amount of relevant experience, Clinton has engaged in a scorched earth tactics to attempt to vilify and infantilize Obama with half-truths and outright lies. It is hard for me to believe I supported her as recently as six months ago – I am really sickened and angered by her decision to go Rove. The reality is that Clinton won in Ohio and Texas not because of any positive message she has, but through the same old false smears and fear tactics Rove and Bush and Cheney have been using for the past eight years. Sad indeed. Where’s the honor? Where’s the trustworthiness?

To this day, Clinton has not come forward with a compelling reason to support her. She has a number of interesting policy proposals, but has expressed absolutely no governing philosophy at all. Why does she advocate the things she does? How does she see the world? What does she view as the role of government? Obama has answered these types of questions, at length, in several books. Clinton, not so much. If Clinton doesn’t come up with a positive, compelling message, she should not win. If she takes the nomination anyway, the democrats will lose, and it will be entirely on her shoulders.