Is Being a First Lady Really "Work Experience?"

Daschle: First lady experience doesn’t count for Clinton
By Aaron Blake
Posted: 03/09/08 01:41 PM [ET]

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) on Sunday questioned Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (N.Y.) pitching of herself as the most experienced candidate in the Democratic presidential race, suggesting her years as first lady do not add much to her foreign policy credentials.

I have been wondering when someone would comment on this. For weeks now, Clinton has said she has more experience than Obama. How is that, when he was elected to the Senate several years before Clinton?

So, if I am the wife of a neurosurgeon, then I can put that down on my resume and lift up a scalpel and slice open your brain? I'm qualified, right? After all, my husband's experience should automatically become mine through marital osmosis.

And that brings up something else.... If Clinton is claiming her years as the president's wife as "experience" then she is also stating that we should view the spouse of the president as an elected position of leadership. So - do you really want to elect Bill Clinton again?

Think about it.

Here's the rest of the article:

Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press, Daschle, a supporter of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), pointed out that Obama has served in elective office longer than Clinton and suggested her time as first lady does not have much relevance to the office she seeks.

“I worked with her; I know what a good first lady she was,” Daschle said. “But it would be hard for me to draw some degree of connection between being a first lady and having the experience to be the
commander in chief.

“I don’t think anyone can look at her experience as first lady and say, for some reason, that qualifies her to run for president of the United States.”