Hillary Clinton on Barack Obama:

He was a part-time state senator for a few years, and then he came to the Senate and immediately started running for president. And that’s his prerogative. That’s his right. But I think it is important to compare and contrast our records.

Part time, okay….

Meanwhile, the experience thing is obviously a good issue for Clinton but I feel like when you put it this bluntly, it sort of evaporates. I mean, compare their records? Clinton’s record turns out to be really thin — she’s only been a Senator since 2001 and hasn’t authored any major legislation. Barack Obama’s been in the US Senate even more briefly, but did write some significant bills as an Illinois Senator, and has served more years in elected office than has Clinton. Like everyone else, I can’t shake the sense that Clinton’s years of first ladying amount to some kind of substantial experience, but they don’t really amount to a record. What’s more, in a lot of ways she’s really not running on her husband’s record — she’s certainly not emphasizing the idea that she’s going to be a committed free trader and budget balancer.

UPDATE: To be clear, it’s not Clinton’s fault that she hasn’t authored any significant legislation — it wasn’t in the cards given the larger political situation. But that’s what makes it strange for her to specifically ask us to compare her “record” with Obama’s; what are we supposed to find when we look?

When I wrote this morning that “it would make perfect sense for Obama to try to re-enforce his message of change and transcendence by picking a red state woman governor like Kathleen Sebelius or Janet Napolitano as his running mate” I hadn’t realized that Napolitano was gearing up to endorse Barack Obama which presumably helps strengthen the case.

Chris Bowers, incidentally, agrees with me that a VP pick should re-enforce the candidate’s message not balance the ticket, but sees Napolitano as a “balancing” choice. Maybe the fact that Chris sees her as a balance pick while I see her as a re-enforcement pick means she has the best of both worlds. Now, though, is probably a good time to admit that I don’t actually know a great deal about Governor Napolitano and maybe she’s terrible on some key issues or something.

Discussing President Bush’s trip to Israel, Jim Towey, who served four years as director of the president’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, told the Chicago Tribune that “the president does not claim to have divine guidance when he makes decisions, but he sure seeks it.” In 2003, however, Texas evangelist James Robinson, said that Bush told him:

I feel like God wants me to run for President. … I know it won’t be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it.

A reader emails:

So all these people are wringing their hands about how Ron Paul turns out to have been a racist and homophobe back in tha day — but it really didn’t come as a shock to me at all. It wasn’t like I suspected him of such leanings, having not even heard of the man until this past year, but as soon as I heard that he was a gold standard-bearer, I immediately put him into the conspiracist-loon pile of my brain. And once someone is already an “out” loony, there’s no reason to be surprised by the additional lunacies to which they turn out to subscribe. Anyway, just a thought.

That seems about right to me. I am curious, though, as to how belief in the gold standard went from being a total CW position held against the dangerous radical William Jennings Bryan to its current status as a lunatic fringe notion, a good indicator that you belong in the “conspiracist-loon pile” of the brain.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has spent the last few weeks saying that in order to ensure the stability of Iraq, the United States should be prepared to stay in the country for 100 to one million years. On Sunday, he said he may support permanent bases in Iraq.

President Bush recently signed an agreement for an “enduring” relationship with Iraq, signaling his support for a long-term military presence of unspecified length. But even Bush is queasy at the thought of supporting McCain’s occupation plan.

In an interview with NBC aired this morning, the President rejected McCain’s plan to keep the troops in Iraq for a century or more, saying, “That’s a long time”:

Q: John McCain has been saying on the campaign trail that the American people would accept U.S. troops remaining in Iraq for a hundred years. Do you agree with that?

BUSH: I don’t know if a hundred years is the right number. That’s a long time.

Watch it:

Bush, however, did say he could “easily” see troops in Iraq for the next decade. “It could very well be, but it’s going to be on the invitation of the Iraqi government. … It could easily be that [ten years]. Absolutely,” he said.

With even the President distancing himself from McCain, it’s clear that McCain is even more hawkish than Bush on Iraq.

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