Hillary Is "Misleading The American Public"

Greg Craig, former counsel to Bill Clinton and now Obama supporter, sat down for an interview with National Journal. His comments reflected more strongly a memo he had penned last week, suggesting that Hillary's claims of experience were overblown. An excerpt from the interview:

Q: I want to welcome Greg Craig. He is a Washington attorney and a senior adviser to the Barack Obama campaign. And he was, back in the Bill Clinton administration, the assistant to the president and special counsel and at that time a senior foreign policy adviser to President Clinton's administration. Welcome, Greg.

Craig: Nice to be here, Linda.

Q: So you have written a provocative memo for the Obama campaign making the argument that Hillary Clinton's experience as first lady, in terms of its relevance to being commander in chief and an expert on foreign policy, may have been exaggerated. How so?

Craig: Well, that was the point of my memo. If you're running for president on the basis of your claims of experience, when you then cite examples, you should be careful to be accurate. The evidence should be accurate. And my point is that Senator Clinton and her supporters have in serious ways overstated, if not grossly exaggerated, the nature of her experience. Take the Irish peace process -- which was a lengthy and arduous and difficult negotiation. She said, initially, that "I helped bring peace to Northern Ireland." Well, if you took the many, many heroes who were responsible for achieving that agreement -- I could name 20 people in Ireland. Primarily, the Irish were responsible for doing this, and the Americans were strong supporters.

But it's a little bit presumptuous for the first lady, who would meet people and support people to take credit away from the Irish themselves who did it. Terry McAuliffe said, "We would not have peace today had it not been for Hillary's hard work in Northern Ireland." That's just not true. This morning, Senator Clinton said on NPR that the role that she played in the Irish peace process was "instrumental." Well, that's not accurate. That's an overstatement. And anybody who is really knowledgeable about what went on, including George Mitchell, who wrote a book about it -- he wrote a book about the peace process, and he never mentioned any role whatsoever that Senator Clinton, or the first lady at the time, played.

Q: Well, you know, of course, that the Clinton campaign immediately put out a memo quoting George Mitchell saying that she did play a positive role over the decade in bringing peace to Northern Ireland.

Craig: Well, playing a positive role is a little bit different than claiming that you were instrumental. She wasn't involved in the tough negotiations. She played no role in resolving the tough issues. She met on one occasion in the White House with Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, and that was nice. It was a photo opportunity. She traveled to Ireland with her husband and met with the women, and the women, of course, were heroic in their work for peace. But she can't take credit for bringing the women together. They were the courageous ones that did it themselves. What she said was, "It's a good thing you're doing it. We're all for you. I hope you're successful." That's not instrumental. That's not bringing peace to Ireland.

Q: You also say that the claim that she has passed the commander in chief test, then, is not supported by this record.

Craig: No, I think, look -- I think she would be a capable commander in chief. I think Barack Obama, who is my candidate, would also be a capable commander in chief. I'm not denigrating that. What I'm saying is that when you talk about evidence of experience, you should be accurate as to what your role really was. Here's another example -- she claims that she negotiated the opening of the borders in the former Republic of Macedonia, and she arrived the day after that had been achieved. She traveled there, but she had nothing to do with the negotiations. And Ambassador [Robert] Gelbard, who was very much involved, said that she really didn't play any role in that at all and that it's a mistake and not accurate for her to take credit for it.

Q: And again, of course, you know that the Clinton campaign has said that former senior foreign policy adviser to the Clinton administration, Richard Holbrooke, said she did play a role.

Craig: She claims that she negotiated the opening of the borders -- that's not accurate, and Ambassador Holbrooke would be the first to agree that that's not accurate.

Q: So let's just put this on a scale of one to 10 here. Are we talking exaggeration, or are we talking about something more serious, such as not being truthful?

Craig: Well, I think it's exaggeration. It's inflated résumé. It's in that category. I think she is misleading the American public on the nature of her experience.

Q: But was that experience, do you think, that is -- having a lot of influence with advisers, giving private advice to her husband -- was that experience that has helped prepare her to be commander in chief?

Craig: Oh, I don't doubt that. The point that I am making is that her claims of the nature of that experience are overstated. The fact is she did not sit in on national security meetings. She did not have a security clearance. She did not attend meetings in the situation room. She conducted no negotiations. She did not manage any part of the national security bureaucracy. She did not have her own national security staff. That's the fact. Now the experience that she did have -- watching and sometimes sitting in the room where discussions were going on and also meeting heads of state and foreign ministers -- that is good experience, and it's invaluable to understanding how the world works when it comes to international organizations as well as international negotiations.

Q: Let's talk for a second about your own candidate, Barack Obama. You did say earlier that certainly Senator Clinton's experience as first lady gives her some preparation that is important. She did travel to -- what was it? -- 80 countries, and Barack Obama has been in the Senate just a few years.

Craig: Three years.

Q: How does his foreign policy experience possibly stand up to hers?

Craig: Well, I don't think that you necessarily look at the number of years in Washington as the basis for judging whether someone is going to be a good commander in chief. On that score -- Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld -- they've been many, many years in Washington, D.C. Longevity isn't what you look at. I think what you want to look at is judgment.

The point I would make about Senator Obama is that on foreign policy issues, not only the ones that he has framed and debated in the campaign, but also prior to this -- his speech in 2002, when he laid out the reasons that he was opposed to the invasion of Iraq and the war in Iraq, and those reasons turned out to be prophetic. He actually predicted very much of what has happened in Iraq and why we should not have gone in in the first place. He's served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he's got a record of good judgments and strong views on this that, I think, make him fully qualified to be a good commander in chief.

Q: OK, well, very interesting perspective from Greg Craig, who is a senior adviser to the campaign of Barack Obama. Greg, thank you so much for being with us.

Craig: Not at all. I enjoyed it.