Assessing Clinton's "Experience"

By Karen Tumulty, Michael Duffy and Massimo Calabresi

In her race to win the democratic nomination against a first-term Senator from Illinois, Hillary Clinton has put the criterion of experience front and center. She often references what she says is 35 years of work that qualifies her to run the country. And the most important achievements Clinton cites are the ones she claims from her years as First Lady -- a job that carries no portfolio but can wield enormous influence.

The nature of Hillary Clinton's involvement was always a matter of great sensitivity in her husband's White House. After her disastrous 1994 foray into health-care reform, Bill Clinton's aides went out of their way to downplay her role in Administration decision making. She rarely appeared at meetings in which officials hashed out important policy trade-offs, but when the discussion centered on issues that were among her priorities, she sent her aides -- much the way Vice President Al Gore did. "There were certain issues they kind of owned," recalls Gene Sperling, who headed economic policy in the Clinton White House. The First Lady's top concerns, he says, were children's issues, health care, and foster-care and adoption policies.

Now the former First Lady claims at least a share of the credit for a wide range of the Clinton Administration's signature accomplishments, both domestic and overseas. Does she deserve it? The Clinton and Obama campaigns spent this week arguing that question with dueling memos and talking points.

TIME decided to cut through the spin with a series that will take a closer look at the claims candidates make. As Senator Clinton is fond of saying, It's time to get real. We kick off the series by evaluating three of the achievements she mentions most often:

Children's Health Care

WHAT SHE SAYS One of her biggest achievements, Clinton often tells voters, is the multibillion-dollar health-care program that provides coverage for children whose parents are too rich for Medicaid but unable to afford health insurance on their own. As one of her campaign ads puts it, "She changed the lives of 6 million kids when she championed the bill that gave them health insurance."

After comprehensive health-care reform went down to defeat in 1994, Clinton and other health-care advocates looked for targeted changes that might win more support. The most likely seemed the issue of providing coverage to children of the working poor. In October 1996, Senator Edward Kennedy introduced a bill to do just that, financed with a 75-c- cigarette-tax increase; in his State of the Union address the following January, Bill Clinton announced a plan to cover 5 million kids.

It was one of several health policies Clinton proposed, including one that would expand coverage for the unemployed. Internally, according to one former White House aide, the First Lady argued that the White House should keep its focus on the more politically popular plan to focus on children.

In May 1997, however, when then Senate majority leader Trent Lott said the children's health plan would blow up their balanced-budget deal, the President abruptly changed course and actively lobbied Democratic lawmakers to vote against it. As a result, the provision failed, and Kennedy was furious at what he considered a betrayal. Hillary defended her husband's decision, telling one audience, "He had to safeguard the budget proposal."

The measure was resurrected a month later, largely through the efforts of Kennedy and Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, who worked behind the scenes on Capitol Hill and built a coalition of children's advocacy groups to bring public pressure on Congress to pass the measure. Kennedy also privately pressed the First Lady to use her influence at the White House. After Bill Clinton signed the bill into law that August, Kennedy said at a press conference, "Mrs. Clinton ... was of invaluable help, both in the fashioning and the shaping of the program and also as a clear advocate."

THE BOTTOM LINE: The record suggests Clinton did indeed lobby for children's health coverage but that many others were responsible as well. And it also shows that her husband nearly killed the idea before it ever got off the ground.

Northern Ireland

WHAT SHE SAYS On the campaign trail, Clinton has claimed she "helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland" in the 1990s.

Clinton's words are very carefully chosen. She has never claimed to have actually negotiated the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which paved the way toward power-sharing in Northern Ireland. Her involvement was more about generating public and private support for peace talks in the months leading up to that agreement.

It's a key distinction. There is no question that the First Lady encouraged women from Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods to push their political leaders toward the bargaining table. She traveled to Northern Ireland twice by herself in the mid- to late 1990s and praised those who stood up for peace. She engaged in particular with a group of women peace activists who were largely cut out of the male-dominated negotiations and encouraged them to keep the pressure on.

Some of Clinton's supporters, like former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, say this pressure was instrumental in creating the atmosphere for the eventual peace agreement. But several diplomatic sources who worked on the peace talks say that the women's groups were not nearly as pivotal to the process as Hillary's backers maintain. And Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, former First Minister of Northern Ireland, told Britain's Daily Telegraph that Clinton was not involved in the process and her claims to have played a direct role were "a wee bit silly."

Clinton's husband and, to an even greater extent, former Senator George Mitchell were much more involved in those efforts, when the eyeball-to-eyeball negotiations began. Clinton was working on the outside, said several involved in the process. "She was helpful with Vital Voices," said Jean Kennedy Smith, former ambassador to Ireland, referring to a women's organization in the country. "But as far as anything political went, there was nothing as far as I know, nothing to do with negotiations." Smith, who is supporting Obama, suggested the process was well under way by the time Clinton got involved.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Clinton played a role in hearing the concerns of Irish women left out of the peace process, and in encouraging them to put pressure on their countrymen to pursue negotiations. But that does not mean she rolled up her sleeves and conducted or led the talks that resulted in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

Macedonia Refugees

WHAT SHE SAYS "I negotiated open borders to let fleeing refugees into safety from Kosovo," Clinton has asserted when asked to identify an example of her foreign policy experience.

Clinton's shorthand version of her role in the 1999 refugee crisis in Macedonia is accurate but oversimplified. She did discuss open borders with the President and Prime Minister of Macedonia on May 14, 1999. (Borders between that country and Kosovo had been opening and closing for weeks.) She did support requests for economic help that the Macedonians were making.

But keeping the borders open was a key U.S. diplomatic project at the time, and her initiative was but a part of the larger effort. During the NATO war with neighboring Serbia that spring, the fate of Kosovars fleeing Serbian ethnic cleansing was a pressing issue on the international stage. If a flood of refugees overwhelmed Macedonia, a wider regional war could erupt. No one, however, wanted to leave the Kosovars to the mercy of the Serbs. So finding a temporary home for them was crucial.

When Clinton arrived in the middle of the situation in that May, diplomats on the ground expected an ineffectual high-profile visit. But they were wrong. "She was quite at ease and professional," says a diplomat who served in the Macedonian capital, Skopje, at the time. Clinton visited refugees in camps on the border and held talks with the Macedonian leadership.

When the Prime Minister complained about American companies terminating textile contracts with local firms, Clinton promised to urge the businesses to change course. Five weeks after her trip, Clinton returned to the country with a pledge from Liz Claiborne to support textile manufacturing there.

THE BOTTOM LINE: In the case of Macedonia, Clinton engaged in personal diplomacy that brought about change. But securing the return of American business partners is not the same as the opening of borders to thousands of refugees. That accomplishment was a result of broader U.S. and European efforts during the war.