Apparently already tiring of going after fellow Republicans, Apparently already tiring of going after fellow Republicans, Mitt Romney is now airing an ad in Michigan that targets Hillary Clinton. And he's playing the card she's been using on Obama: experience.
Setting aside the sheer hilarity of equating running the country to running the Olympics, it's at best an absurd claim. "She hasn't run a corner store. She hasn't run a state. She hasn't run a city... The idea that she could learn to be President as an internship just doesn't make any sense." Of course if she had run a corner store, they'd use that against her. But unless you've been president, the job of being president will be new to you, and running a state or city is hardly the same. She could equally accuse the Republican front-runners of having no national-level political experience. Or no experience in foreign policy. Or ... well, one could go on and on.
But more importantly, Republicans want to have it both ways on Clinton: either she's already been in (insert:"the White House," "Washington," "national politics" here) too long, or she hasn't been there long enough. Either she was pulling the strings on Bill or she would be just "an intern" as president. It doesn't seem like a smart tack for Romney to take.
Interesting, though, that he's running the ad in Michigan, where the Dems have vowed to strip the state of its delegates at the 2008 Democratic National Convention if they move forward with plans to hold their primary on Jan. 15. Perhaps he thinks some preemptive Dem-bashing there will do good by the party in the general election. The state isn't usually ranked as one of the top priorities for the Republicans, but Kerry won by a fairly slim margin there in 2004.
--Kate Sheppard
