SCHIP

Addressing Iowa voters in November, Clinton said, "in 1997, I joined forces with members of Congress and we passed the State Children's Health Insurance Program." Clinton regularly cites the number of children in each state who are covered by the program, and mothers of sick children have appeared at Clinton campaign rallies to thank her.

This has been familiar to anyone who has regularly seen the debates of her campaign speeches. However, doubt is now being cast on her role. Here's Orrin Hatch:

"The White House wasn't for it. We really roughed them up" in trying to get it approved over the Clinton administration's objections, Hatch said in an interview. "She may have done some advocacy [privately] over at the White House, but I'm not aware of it."

"I do like her," Hatch said of Hillary Clinton. "We all care about children. But does she deserve credit for SCHIP? No - Teddy does, but she doesn't."

Ted Kennedy:

Asked whether Clinton was exaggerating her role in creating SCHIP, Kennedy, stopped in the hallway as he was entering the chamber to vote, half-shrugged.

"Facts are stubborn things," he said, declining to criticize Clinton directly. "I think we ought to stay with the facts."

I agree with Ted...and so does Ted:

"The children's health program wouldn't be in existence today if we didn't have Hillary pushing for it from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue," Kennedy told The Associated Press.

President Clinton signed the bill in August 1997.

While Kennedy is widely viewed as the driving force behind the program, by all accounts the former first lady's pressure was crucial.

"She wasn't a legislator, she didn't write the law, and she wasn't the president, so she didn't make the decisions," says Nick Littlefield, then a senior health adviser to Kennedy. "But we relied on her, worked with her and she was pivotal in encouraging the White House to do it."

NORTHERN IRELAND

Greg Craig, Washington attorney and a senior adviser to the Barack Obama campaign, and former Clinton administration official:

It's a little bit presumptuous for the first lady, who would meet people and support people to take credit away from the Irish themselves who did it...

The evidence should be accurate. And my point is that Senator Clinton and her supporters have in serious ways overstated, if not grossly exaggerated, the nature of her experience.

Pretty damning, huh? Not really. There are a lot of important testimonials I could put here, but this is a good one:

Statement from John Hume former MP MEP, founder of the SDLP and an architect of the Good Friday Agreement. He is the only person to win the Nobel Prize for Peace, the Ghandi Peace Award and the Martin Luther King Peace Prize.

"I am quite surprised that anyone would suggest that Hillary Clinton did not perform important foreign policy work as First Lady. I can state from firsthand experience that she played a positive role for over a decade in helping to bring peace to Northern Ireland.

She visited Northern Ireland, met with very many people and gave very decisive support to the peace process. There is no doubt that the people of Northern Ireland think very positively of Hillary Clinton's support for our peace process, due to her visits to Northern Ireland and her meetings with so many people. In private she made countless calls and contacts, speaking to leaders and opinion makers on all sides, urging them to keep moving forward.

Anyone criticizing her foreign policy involvement should look at her very active and positive approach to Northern Ireland and speak with the people of Northern Ireland who have the highest regard for her and are very grateful for her very active support for our peace process."

See also.

Actually, Greg Craig can't even seem to agree with himself on these matters.

Greg Craig Tuesday:

Hillary Clinton's argument that she has passed "the Commander-in-Chief test" is simply not supported by her record.

Greg Craig today:

I think she would be a capable Commander-in-Chief.

Ummmm....okay?

KOSOVO

During the air war over Kosovo, Hillary Clinton went to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in May 1999. What did she accomplish? Here's the Obama campaign's Greg Craig again (I find that name annoying, by the way):

The negotiations that led to the opening of the borders were accomplished by the people who ordinarily conduct negotiations with foreign governments - U.S. diplomats.  President Clinton's top envoy to the Balkans, former Ambassador Robert Gelbard, said, "I cannot recall any involvement by Senator Clinton in this issue."  Ivo Daalder worked on the Clinton Administration's National Security Council and wrote a definitive history of the Kosovo conflict.  He recalls that "she had absolutely no role in the dirty work of negotiations."

Starting to see a pattern here? Here's both a news report and a testimonial to set the record straight:

Hillary met with Macedonian officials 'trying to diffuse any anti-American sentiment and to bolster Macedonia's fragile coalition government. "Hillary Rodham Clinton swept through Macedonia on Friday on a visit that illustrated the Clinton administration's continuing struggle to balance the diverse strands of its Kosovo policy...Ethnic Macedonians, who make up roughly two-thirds of this country's population, generally oppose NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia. They also fear that if ethnic Albanians -- who made up roughly one-third of Macedonia's population before the crisis -- continue to pour in from Kosovo, Macedonians will be reduced to a minority in their own country. So although Clinton spent the morning addressing the suffering of the refugees, she spent the rest of the day trying to defuse any anti-American sentiment and to bolster Macedonia's fragile coalition government, a mix of Macedonian and Albanian parties." [Austin American-Statesman, 5/15/99]

Statement of Richard Holbrooke, architect of the Dayton Accords, and former permanent representative to the United Nations.

"It was dire in May 1999 when Hillary Clinton arrived in Macedonia. The government of Macedonia had slowed the flow of refugees from Kosovo to a trickle. After visiting refugees and gaining a first-hand assessment of the situation, the First Lady had intense talks with President Gligorov and Prime Minister Georgievski. In these talks, one in the Presidential Palace, another in the residence of the American Ambassador, Christopher Hill, Mrs. Clinton pressed the Macedonian government to fully open the border so that Kosovar Albanian refugees could flee the war zone to safety. She also committed herself to work with the government and people of Macedonia who also faced an emergency because of the threat to their own safety and stability. Hillary Clinton promised to take action to help the Macedonian economy. Returning to Washington, she pressed hard in the administration for action to support the Macedonians. She even contacted American business executives to ensure that American textile contracts in Macedonia were not canceled. There is no doubt in my mind, nor in the minds of those people I worked with in the Balkans at the time - that her intense efforts resulted in easing a crisis of significant dimensions and contributed to saving many lives."

There is a lot more.

BOSNIA (AKA the Sinbad trip)

In 1996, Hillary flew into Bosnia, accompanied by Sheryl Crow and Sinbad, a current Obama supporter.

Clinton cites her March 1996 trip to Bosnia as an example of traveling into a war zone to promote U.S. policy, recalling a harrowing "corkscrew" landing during which she and her daughter, Chelsea, were ordered into the armored front of the plane to protect them against possible ground fire. She jokes that one mantra around the Clinton White House, was that "if the place was too small, too dangerous or too poor, send Hillary."

Boy, doesn't this sound vaguely familiar:

Harrowing? Not that Sinbad recalls. He just remembers it being a USO tour to buck up the troops amid a much worse situation than he had imagined between the Bosnians and Serbs.

In an interview with the Sleuth Monday, he said the "scariest" part of the trip was wondering where he'd eat next. "I think the only 'red-phone' moment was: 'Do we eat here or at the next place.'"

Clinton, during a late December campaign appearance in Iowa, described a hair-raising corkscrew landing in war-torn Bosnia, a trip she took with her then-teenage daughter, Chelsea. "They said there might be sniper fire," Clinton said.

Threat of bullets? Sinbad doesn't remember that, either.

"I never felt that I was in a dangerous position. I never felt being in a sense of peril, or 'Oh, God, I hope I'm going to be OK when I get out of this helicopter or when I get out of his tank.'"

But once again, even in this instance...facts are stubborn things, for Ted Kennedy and Sinbad alike:

Defending Clinton's characterization of her Bosnia mission, campaign spokesman Phil Singer kindly provided experts from news stories written about the trip at the time, including a Washington Post story from May 26, 1996, that said, "This trip to Bosnia marks the first time since Roosevelt that a first lady has voyaged to a potential combat zone."

Singer also cited a Kansas City Star article from September 2000 that quoted Sinbad as describing the situation in Bosnia as "so tense. It was Crips and Bloods."

And get this...

....they are even starting to downplay her "Womens rights as human rights" speech in China in 1995:

In her memoir, Clinton writes about the rousing reception her speech received at the conference and adds: "What I didn't know at the time was that my 21-minute speech would become a manifesto for women all over the world. To this day, whenever I travel overseas, women come up to me quoting words from the Beijing speech or clutching copies they want me to autograph."

Rice, the former Clinton administration official now supporting Obama, credits the first lady for delivering an important speech on women's rights, but says that that doesn't translate into presidential crisis management credentials.

Question: Is the Obama campaign sure they want to get into a discussion of candidates who give great speeches that are not followed up by action?

CONCLUSION

Hillary Clinton has dealt, and will deal, with this sort of stuff better than John Kerry did. But there will be more, and it will probably get worse...