For Democrats, Change Is of the Essence

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Edwards's Final Iowa Push

John Edwards launches a 36-hour non-stop campaign swing in Ames, Iowa, while The Post's Anne Kornblut assesses the state of the Democratic race.

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From perhaps his most prominent foreign policy perch, the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations European Affairs subcommittee, Obama did not convene a single hearing in 2007. Of the 85 hearings convened by the full Foreign Relations Committee since the Democrats took back control of the Senate, Obama presided over two -- one on June 21, another on Feb. 27, both to consider nominations.

As chairman of the Environment and Public Works subcommittee on Superfund and environmental health, Clinton has called three oversight hearings. But from her more prominent post, on the Armed Services Committee, Clinton has a mixed record. Of the panel's 55 hearings, a transcript review by The Washington Post found her in attendance at 60 percent, compared with the 71 percent attended by another presidential hopeful, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

According to available transcripts, Clinton attended 35 percent of the Environment and Public Works Committee hearings of the 109th Congress, compared with Obama's 59 percent.

Edwards's one term in the Senate was spent mostly in the minority, without even a subcommittee chairmanship.

Clinton has positioned herself as the candidate of experience, the one ready to hit the presidency running and the one with the inside knowledge of Washington necessary to secure an agenda. "I'm not asking you to take me on a leap of faith," Clinton told a packed auditorium in Ames, Iowa, yesterday, listing her r¿sum¿ both as a lawyer and as a first lady.

But it is a tricky place for her. Was she a wife with a front-row seat in the Clinton years, or was she an integral part of the policy apparatus, responsible for her husband's failures as well as his successes? Was her failed effort to come up with a national health plan a sign of her ineffectiveness or a hard-won lesson for the future?

Since the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, both Clintons have been on the campaign stump, speaking of the hair-raising, dangerous journeys Hillary Clinton took as first lady to international hot spots, including a stomach-churning "corkscrew" landing into Bosnia.

"If a place was too dangerous, too poor or too small, send the first lady," she told voters in Dubuque on Saturday. But as she described in her autobiography, "Living History," she was apparently not alone in her bravery. That goodwill flight to Bosnia included comedian Sinbad, singer Sheryl Crow and her own teenage daughter, Chelsea.

Her supporters like to point out just how deeply Clinton was integrated into White House policymaking when her husband was president.

"I can't believe there's any major issue -- in fact, any issue at all -- that she did not discuss with her husband, formally or informally," said Mickey Kantor, a former U.S. trade representative and commerce secretary in the Clinton administration.

But where she disagreed with her husband, she often did not prevail. She advocated intervention in Rwanda's genocidal civil war that never came, and she was "very skeptical" that side agreements for the North American Free Trade Agreement on labor rights and environmental standards went far enough, Kantor said. And while she championed the cause of poor children at the Children's Defense Fund, she was "strangely quiet" during the Clinton administration's debate over welfare reform, a debate that caused open ruptures when President Bill Clinton decided to sign the Republican welfare overhaul into law, said one administration insider involved in the welfare debate.

Mindful of the electorate's anti-Washington streak, her camp also emphasizes that her experience goes beyond her eight years as first lady and her seven in the U.S. Senate. Her r¿sum¿ includes heading two committees for the American Bar Association, longtime service on the board of the advocacy group Children's Defense Fund, chairing the board of the Legal Services Corporation, and her position championing education reform in Arkansas.