No cookies yet, but tea becomes a topic

WEBSTER CITY, Iowa – The debate about whether Hillary Clinton’s eight years as First Lady qualify as solid foreign policy experience has picked up anew today.

Barack Obama had a cutting remark on the trail: “It’s that experience, that understanding, not just of what world leaders I went and talked to in the ambassadors house I had tea with, but understanding the lives of the people like my grandmother who lives in a tiny hut in Africa,” he said in Iowa.

Chris Dodd had a similar take. “To somehow suggest having been the First Lady is the kind of experience that qualifies you to be president, I’ve never heard that argument before,” he told Time.

Former secretary of state and Clinton supporter Madeleine Albright shot back at Obama. “Senator Clinton has been in refugee camps, clinics, orphanages, and villages all around the world, including places where tea is not the usual drink,” she said in a statement. “In addition to these experiences she has met with world leaders and has known many of them for years.”

Clinton herself has been speaking in the last two days about how she knew Benazir Bhutto for a dozen years after having visited her in Pakistan as First Lady.

The Clinton campaign also opened a fancy new website, attacktimeline.com, that documents Obama and John Edwards’s attacks on the New York Senator. Obama has a similar site called “Hillary Attacks.”