35 Years of Experience

Papers documenting how Hillary Clinton spent her years as First Lady have been released. They show:

Her schedule has her choosing flowers for a black-tie dinner, congratulating "Guns Aren't Cool" award winners and reading to kids in the week in January 1998 that upended her life and threatened his presidency. She denounced a "vast right-wing conspiracy" in a TV interview.

Ah, says her campaign, but what about her 80 trips to foreign countries? That experience will help guide her foreign policy!

Her Democratic presidential campaign released a statement Wednesday saying the schedules spanning her two terms as first lady "illustrate the array of substantive issues she worked on" and her travel to more than 80 countries "in pursuit of the administration's domestic and foreign policy goals."

Clinton says her years as first lady would help equip her to handle foreign policy and national security as president.

But the schedules show trips packed with plainly traditional activities for a first lady as well as some substance.

For example, in her January 1994 visit to Russia with her husband, her schedule is focused on events with political wives. She sat in on a birthing class at a hospital, toured a cathedral and joined prominent women in a lunch of blinis with caviar and salmon.

The Clinton campaign said the schedules are merely a guide and don't reflect all of her activities.

Experience you can believe in! Surely, attending a Russian birthing class in 1994 qualifies her to answer the telephone at 3 a.m. But let's not forget the corruption of those years:

Mrs. Clinton's ordeal during the Monica Lewinsky scandal followed her own legal troubles in 1996 during the criminal investigation of the Clintons' Whitewater real estate dealings in Arkansas.

In the Whitewater probe, one of the most pivotal events occurred on Jan. 4, 1996, a day in which Mrs. Clinton's personal calendar for late that afternoon is marked "Private Meeting" with her chief of staff, Margaret Williams.

Several hours earlier, an aide had discovered inside the White House family residence long-sought billing records of Mrs. Clinton's legal work on Whitewater-related real estate transactions that turned out to be fraudulent.

Furious prosecutors, who had subpoenaed the records 18 months earlier, ordered Mrs. Clinton to testify before a federal grand jury about the records, which she did on Jan. 26, 1996.

Her calendar for Jan. 26 says "No Public Schedule," although the first lady stood before a bank of microphones in front of the federal courthouse in Washington, and declared: "I am happy to answer the grand jury's questions." Several hours of testimony she gave that day made her the first first lady to ever be hauled in for questioning before a federal grand jury.

Neither the federal probe by Independent Counsel Ken Starr nor Republican-led investigations on Capitol Hill were ever able to sort out why the records of Mrs. Clinton's work had never been turned over to investigators. Mrs. Clinton said she had no idea where the billing records had been.

And the outright flip-flops:

She was also involved in helping her husband win congressional approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement, a deal she now criticizes and says she would try to change.

In short, in Clinton's 8 years as First Lady, the most substantive thing she accomplished may have been testifying before a federal grand jury as to why financial records related to Whitewater were mysteriously "lost" and then "found" again.

Now let's get those tax records made public!