The high-priced consultants taken on by the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign for the presidency seem to have decided, perhaps as a result of listening to their focus groups, that experience is an attribute that’s important to the electorate. So, given that the candidate’s tenure in public office has been relatively brief, Mrs. Clinton’s life experiences are being trotted out to fill her resume.

As someone who hasn’t held a paying job in four decades, I can certainly appreciate the value of life experiences. However, the quality of those experiences and their usefulness to the tasks at hand need to be considered for relevance.



Which is why I just have to say that it’s not about baking cookies, Mrs. Clinton. It’s not about ordering a sumptuous lunch from the White House chef or hosting a dinner for an Arab shiek, either.

What it’s about, if we’re talking about food, is a crisis in childhood obesity and juvenile-onset diabetes, brought on by a village in which our children are secured in their car seats, their buses and their stuffy classrooms, or plopped in front of the media center to be fattened, not unlike Hansel and Gretel in the fable, in preparation for a life time of doing what they’re told.

It’s not about reading to toddlers from a picture book for another photo-shoot. It’s about the children of Fallujah having their skin burned away by “willy pete” and the streets of that ravaged city lined with the bloated corpses of its young men, stacked like cord-wood, making a feast for the flies.

It’s not about rolling bandages or touring surgical wards at the VA to pin medals on chests and look away from stumps. It’s about thousands of soldiers who can’t get the stench of their comrades’ entrails and the collected body parts out of their nostrils and can’t take a dump without being reminded of the detainees, terrorized into soiling themselves just by looking in the soldier’s eyes.

It’s not about authorizing the use of the most destructive forces man ever built by simply raising one’s hand or pushing the button that says yes. It’s about killing a million Iraqis with bombs, missiles, and howitzer shells because the head of their nation dared to dream (or boast) of acquiring just one nuclear weapon, in hopes of staving off an attack–an attack that has showered more depleted uranium on Iraq than Saddam Hussein ever had.

It’s not about insuring that the clean white bases we’ve plopped down in the deserts of Iraq (depriving millions of sheep of their grazing lands) remain secure enclaves of missile tenders and spies. It’s about having forfeited any right to be hosted by the cradle of civilization, whose antiquities we’ve plundered, whose archeological sites we’ve destroyed and whose lands have been laid waste and despoiled by the detritus of modern war.

It’s not about government housing, complete with staff and utility accounts, that’s provided to the likes of governors and presidents. Which is where Mrs. Clinton’s experience lies. It’s about public housing that has no maintenance staff, nobody to clip the roses, nobody to insure that the roaches and rats don’t live in the walls, and nobody tasked with removing the garbage and trash on which they feast–public housing that the disposessed victims of the “ownership society” (a ship never destined to take them anywhere) would be lucky to find, if only more had been built.

It’s not about Hillary Clinton “choosing” to go with “cap and trade,” yet another version of issuing permits to pollute, to befoul the air and water with industrial wastes. It’s about time we started cleaning this mess up. And, frankly, I don’t get the sense that Mrs. Clinton is up to it–no sense that she’s the Mrs. Clean we’re looking for.

There was a time, not so long ago, when school children could feel good about collecting nickles, instead of spending them on bubble gum, to save Chinese babies from starvation and, not co-incidentally, from being damned to hell. Now our children and their moms have to worry about lead paint on Chinese toys. Shall we blame the Chinese children that were saved? No. Our toys being made in China and sent back here as trade is not their fault. If fault there is, it lies with our own corporate bigwigs who got tired of staying home.

Free trade, without the strings of health and safety regulations. Who’s agenda brought us that? And why is it that clean water and unpolluted air (”free goods”) are, like a free lunch, considered to be bad? But free trade is good?

In any case, considering the mess we’ve made, the friends we’ve antagonized, the enemies we’ve set on edge and shown our vulnerable side, it’s my sense that we in these United States need to get our own house in order before we offer any more advice. We’ve got an election coming up–a chance to set a new direction. And, to be quite blunt, it’s not about Mrs. Clinton or any other of the Democrats. Elections are about the voters; it’s their agenda to define. After that, the only question is who’s ready to spend the blood and guts and sweat to clean up this ungodly mess.

There’s no reason to ask that question about the candidates Republicans put up. The whole bunch of ‘em ain’t worth spit.