I fear I’m turning off most of you by beating on this, but it’s important to examine all of this because it’s important for this primary election and because the Republicans will bring this up in November. Along with her supposed role in the Northern Ireland peace process, Sen. Clinton also claimed to have advocated for intervention in Rwanda to her husband. Bill Clinton corroborates the story, and I’m willing to accept that it’s true. This isn’t the point she’s making, though, in her speeches. This isn’t the same thing as having responsibility to solve these crises or a portfolio responsibility for the area. To reiterate, none of the experience as First Lady being “in the room” counts more than her Senate experience except for those areas where she used her staff and office to accomplish an agenda. The health care effort in the early 90s counts, for example. Chatting with her husband doesn’t.

Hilzoy makes a good point, by the way, about whether she should even bring up her advocacy in the Rwanda policy of the Clinton administration. Not only did he not listen to her, the administration did precisely the opposite thing:

I have no idea whether or not this is true. But I do know a couple of related things. First, if Hillary Clinton did press for military intervention in Rwanda, her advocacy left no trace in the world. I have read quite a lot about the Rwandan genocide and the US reaction towards it, and Hillary Clinton’s involvement comes as news to me. I just went through my various books on the Rwandan genocide (there are eight), and she is not mentioned in any of them. And according to the Chicago Tribune, I’m not alone:

“Whatever her private conversations with the president may have been, key foreign policy officials say that a U.S. military intervention in Rwanda was never considered in the Clinton administration’s policy deliberations. Despite lengthy memoirs by both Clintons and former Secretary of State and UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright, any advice she gave on Rwanda had not been mentioned until her presidential campaign.

…

In an article on the US response to the Rwandan genocide (and written in 2001, years before she met Barack Obama), Samantha Power wrote:

“What is most remarkable about the American response to the Rwandan genocide is not so much the absence of U.S. military action as that during the entire genocide the possibility of U.S. military intervention was never even debated. Indeed, the United States resisted intervention of any kind.”

…

But it’s worse than that. The Clinton administration did not simply fail to intervene militarily in Rwanda. It took a number of steps that made it easier for genocide to be committed. Not taking these steps would have been much, much easier than sending actual troops to Rwanda. They would have made a real difference. And yet the Clinton administration failed to take them.

I’ll turn this over to Samantha Power:

…

This implied that the United States had done a good deal but not quite enough. In reality the United States did much more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda. It aggressively worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements. It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term “genocide,” for fear of being obliged to act. The United States in fact did virtually nothing “to try to limit what occurred.” Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective.”

It also reminds me of the maddening thing about the Bill Clinton years. He was an able and often clever steward of the nation but hardly a bold leader who took chances to push the country toward what he thought was right. In fact, he often folded when faced with a hand he didn’t like or that challenged key constituencies.

He was a good President and I’m sure Sen. Clinton would make a solid President. I’m more sure that Sen. Obama would be a good President and, on top of that, could advocate issues by going to the people on important issues. This is a talent that Sen. Clinton just doesn’t have, and a temperament that she doesn’t have. That’s precisely what makes him a better candidate.