Senator Hillary Clinton, entering perhaps the most crucial week of her political career, warned American voters yesterday to be wary of a Barack Obama presidency, asserting that the grave challenges posed by an unpredictable world demand a more experienced leader.
In a speech on foreign policy at George Washington University, Clinton suggested that it would be risky to put the United States in the hands of her rival, who she argued lacks foreign affairs know-how at a time when Cuba, Pakistan, Kosovo, and other regions of the world are in such upheaval.
"We have seen the tragic result of having a president who had neither the experience nor the wisdom to manage our foreign policy and safeguard our national security," Clinton said, making an implicit comparison, once again, between Obama and President Bush. "America has already taken that chance - one time too many."
Clinton's address was clearly designed to stir concern about the first-term Illinois senator among voters as the two Democrats enter a critical stretch of campaigning ahead of Tuesday's high-stakes votes in Texas and Ohio. Top Clinton supporters and aides acknowledge she must win both states to remain competitive with Obama, who has won 11 straight primaries and caucuses and who holds a sizable lead in delegates.
Obama's campaign shrugged off Clinton's criticism, saying that despite her professed experience she has been guilty of faulty judgment on world affairs, not least by voting in 2002 to authorize the war in Iraq.
The two campaigns yesterday also exchanged heated words over allegations that Clinton staffers had circulated a photo of Obama dressed in Somali garb while on a 2006 trip to Africa. After The Drudge Report, an online news and gossip site, posted an item about the photo, Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, charged that the Clinton campaign "has engaged in the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we've seen from either party in this election."
Issuing a statement in response, Clinton's campaign manager, Maggie Williams, did not deny the allegation outright but said: "If Barack Obama's campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed. Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely."
Clinton has staked her campaign on a belief that voters, after eight years of the Bush administration, want to return the White House to a responsible and tested Democrat. Citing her two terms in the Senate and eight years as first lady, Clinton often says she is prepared to be president on "day one."
She used yesterday's address to paint Obama as unprepared, singling out his statements last year that he would be willing to meet unconditionally with America's enemies and would consider, given "actionable intelligence," a unilateral strike in Pakistan against terrorists.
Clinton, flanked by senior retired military officers who have endorsed her candidacy, said she would meet with adversaries as president but would not be "penciling in the leaders of Iran, or North Korea, or Venezuela, or Cuba on the presidential calendar without preconditions."
"We simply cannot legitimize rogue regimes or weaken American prestige by impulsively agreeing to presidential-level talks that have no preconditions," she said. "It may sound good, but it doesn't meet the real-world test of foreign policy." As for Pakistan, Clinton said: "I will not broadcast threats of unilateral military action against a country like Pakistan just to demonstrate that I'm tough enough for the job."
Clinton also said Obama "wavers from seeming to believe that mediation and meetings without preconditions can solve some of the world's most intractable problems to advocating rash, unilateral military action without cooperation from our allies in the most sensitive region of the world." But then she cast herself in a similar light, saying she would be a president who would "deploy both the olive branch and the arrows."
Obama's top foreign policy advisers sought to pre-empt Clinton's speech by arguing in a conference call with reporters, as they have before, that despite Clinton's claims of experience, she has displayed poor foreign policy judgment. "What is important on day one is to get it right, and to have the right judgment and the right approach to the critical foreign policy challenges of the day," said Susan Rice, former assistant secretary of state for African affairs in Bill Clinton's administration.
Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.
