How can Hillary Clinton say stuff like this with a straight face?

Clinton wondered aloud if it made sense to “put America in the hands of someone with little national or international experience who started running for president as soon as he arrived in the United States Senate.” Obama was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004. Clinton first won election in 2000 from New York.

“How did running for president become a qualification to be president?” Clinton asked a few hundred Iowans at the Surf Ballroom, where Buddy Holly and other first-generation rockers played their last show before dying in a nearby plane crash in 1959.

The exact same criticism could be applied to her. Indeed, Obama has been doing a better job calling her out on the way she keeps using Bill’s time in the White House as the basis for her claims to have more experience.

Along these lines, I was amused (but a little embarrassed) to see Maureen Dowd write almost the same thing as me about Hillary’s experience a couple of weeks ago.

Me on January 4:

Implicitly, the Clinton experience argument seems to rest more on the fact that she was inside the White House advising her husband for eight years. But no one’s suggesting that other people who advised Clinton are qualified to be president on that basis — otherwise Rahm Emanuel and Leon Panetta would be throwing their hats in the ring.

Dowd on November 21:

She was a top adviser who had a Nixonian bent for secrecy and a knack for hard-core politicking. But if running a great war room qualified you for president, Carville and Stephanopoulos would be leading the pack.

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