Will the First Lady records substantiate her “experience” claims?

After managing to turn up the heat last week on Obama’s experience the media narrative has turned the other way and what she says she did as First Lady is being put under the microscope.

One of the specific claims that is under scrutiny is her statement: “I helped bring peace to Northern Ireland”.

A comment from the unionist leader at the time and Nobel Prize winner, David Trimble, is causing the White House contender particular trouble. He said:“I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill (Clinton) going around…I don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player”. One of the main negotiators of the Good Friday Agreement is saying that there was no contact with her during the negotiating process.

The challenge for Hillary is that this opens up the question of whether what she did as First Lady supports her claim that she is more qualified to be commander in chief from “Day One” than Barack Obama.

There’s been a big effort for records of her time in the position from 1993 to 2001 to be put in the public domain and suggestions that the Clintons have been dragging their feet on this. A batch of records, 10,000 pages of a total of 30,000 that are said to be involved, are due to be released in the next few weeks and no doubt every line will be pored over.

The timing could be critical given that it should be available in the period leading up to the Pennsylvania primary. The last thing she wants is for arguments about her specific role to be dominating the headlines.

What a wonderful thing Freedom of Information is.

Socrates has produced this great delegate/poll calculator that you can download here. You enter the size of the Democrat lead for each poll in the poll columns, and then how many polls have been carried out in the # column. The poll average will be worked out automatically. Currently, he has entered up to the last four polls for each state, although he’s ignored the pre-ST ones. You can then assign the delegates for each state in either the McCain or Obama columns, and it will work out totals at the end.

In the betting the Hillary price has eased and is now at 3/1.

Mike Smithson