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I couldn't get Obama's foreign policy panel to stream on my computer today, but I did get Hillary Clinton's press release in response:
“With the critical foreign policy challenges America faces in the world today, voters will decide whether Senator Obama, who served in the Illinois State Senate just three years ago and would have less experience than any President since World War II, has the strength and experience to be the next president. Senator Clinton, who has travelled to 82 countries as a representative of the United States and has been on the Armed Services Committee for close to seven years, is ready to lead starting on Day One.”Yeah? Lead where? On foreign policy, the difference between the two is not only in experience. It's also in opinion. The line-up of Obama's panel, after all, was Richard Danzig, Former secretary of the Navy under President Clinton; Tony Lake, National Security Advisor to President Clinton; Adm. John Hutson (USN Ret.), Dean of Franklin Pierce Law Center, former U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General; Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and renowned professor of human rights and foreign policy; and Susan Rice, Former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. Combined, this crew has, approximately, 30 bazillion times the amount of experience conducting foreign policy that Hillary Clinton does. So I don't exactly think Obama will lack for advisers able to point our Morocco on the map.Of course, that would be for naught if Obama himself didn't have a clearly defined set of principles, and so would waffle from adviser to adviser. But he's got that, too. What separates Obama from Clinton is approach. Clinton is, at least in public statements, harder line than Obama. She's more enamored with our ability to solve problems militarily, less skittish about the costs of bombing Iran, totally unwilling to concede that the theory underpinning the invasion of Iraq was a mistake (her regret is that the weapons didn't exist, not that she was conceptually wrong). But let's be honest here: We'd all tune in to a forum that simply pitted Obama against Hillary on foreign policy. Let's let them talk it out for an hour. No moderator interruptions, no 60 second time limits. If Hillary's campaign is so certain that her experience and command of the issues will allow her to crush him, they should propose it. Either he accepts, and they win, or he declines, and they can call him a coward. And the rest of us end up far more informed.So: How about it?--Ezra Klein
