Things that make me go...

...hmmm.

Without mentioning Mr. Obama by name, Mrs. Clinton and her camp are already asserting that experience will be a key attribute for any successful candidate during difficult times — an argument that her team will no doubt make in a more aggressive way against Mr. Obama if they both jump into the race.

A couple things, actually. First, what's up with these folks who are presumably close enough to and supportive enough of Hillary Clinton to get invites to her supposedly off-the-record strategy dinners. Either the campaign is being disingenuous about the privacy of these events or the people closest to Hillary can't be trusted with a secret. I think most people would look to the Clinton campaign as likely to be the tightest, most polished and professional operation. Looked at through the lens of this story, that seems to be less true than I, at any rate, might have thought.

I wonder, too, how hard Hillary really wants to play the experience card. She was, by all reports, a better than competent corporate attorney before becoming First Lady, but she's served one term in the US Senate in her own right. The notion of the Clinton co-Presidency was pretty much set aside after she set the cause of universal health care back a generation or so by pandering to the private insureance industry. It puts her on par, perhaps, with Obama, who has time in the Illinois legislature to round out his admittedly limited federal experience, and Edwards, whose own legal career carries more populist appeal and whose time in the Senate was truncated by his elevation to a national Presidential ticket. If experience becomes a primary criterion, though, it would seem to benefit candidates like Biden and Dodd and, yes, that Kerry fella, far more than Clinton, in terms of their relative length of service and their focus on the kinds of military, security and diplomatic issues that are generally considered the peculiar province of the Presidency.

Of course, the leaky friends could be agents of a sophisticated disinformation campaign. Hmmm…

Hat tip to Jeralyn at Talk Left.