And about that foreign policy "experience"...

People are starting to look more closely at Hillary Clinton's self-proclaimed foreign policy experience... and coming up a little light on substance.

From a McClatchy Newspapers article that I read in today's Las Vegas Review Journal:

Clinton ... claims that she was a difference-maker in the Balkans. She said that she negotiated opening Macedonia's borders in 1999 to let in refugees fleeing violence in Kosovo....

Ivo Daalder, a former NSC official under President Clinton who was responsible for the Balkans, said that "there's the inconvenient fact that the agreement to open the borders happened the day before she got there."

And Greg Craig, a former State Department official in Bill's administration who now supports Obama, shared this:

Senator Clinton has pointed to a March 1996 trip to Bosnia as proof that her foreign travel involved a life-risking mission into a war zone. She has described dodging sniper fire. While she did travel to Bosnia in March 1996, the visit was not a high-stakes mission to a war zone. On March 26, 1996, the New York Times reported that “Hillary Rodham Clinton charmed American troops at a U.S.O. show here, but it didn’t hurt that the singer Sheryl Crow and the comedian Sinbad were also on the stage.”

Sinbad had this to say about that trip (as reported in the McClatchy story):

"I think the only 'red phone' moment was: Do we eat here or at the next place?" Sinbad told The Washington Post on Monday. "I never felt being in a sense of peril, or 'Oh, God, I hope I'm going to be OK when I get out of this helicopter or when I get out of his tank." Sinbad supports Obama.

So it seems that what really happened depends a lot on your point of view... not a terribly strong leg for Hillary's foreign policy credentials to stand on.

And couple that with the continuing slow release of documents related to the one substantive role that Hillary was known to have--her failed effort to reform health care in the 90s--and you have a picture of her campaign trying to have it both ways: making glowing but undocumented statements about her foreign policy experience while sharing few documents from her failure on domestic matters during Bill's administration.