Does Riding on Marine One Qualify You to Be President?

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20001003122428/ www1.whitehouse.gov/media/jpg/hrcfamily.jpg {{PD-USGov}} Technorati tags: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Executive Office of the President images, Bill Clinton, Chelsea Clinton

This week Hillary Clinton managed to embellish herself into a scandal that detracted the media's attention from Barack Obama's growing problem with his pastor.

Hillary commented on her trip to the former Yugoslavia. 

The country that we invaded after the civil war was mostly over as opposed to Iraq the country that we invaded prior to instigating a civil war.

She stated that when she traveled there she had to be careful due to the danger of sniper fire in the area that she arrived.  Then many news reports unveiled video of her landing with Chelsea and Sinbad walking around shaking hands and receiving flowers from little children.

It was hardly a very dangerous environment and definitely did not live up to the hype of her embellishments.  That said, many media pundits are not claiming that she was well qualified anyway as a former First Lady and that she did not need to embellish her ceremonial activities.

I would agree that embellishing did not help, however, I would suggest that her work as First Lady (by itself) did not qualify her to be President.  Yes, it did give her the ability to meet people from around the world and that is definitely valuable, but many other activities as First Lady did not help her.  She needs to separate out the ceremonial experience a bit and focus on the substantive work behind the scenes.

Its not like she was in charge of the popcorn machines in the White House theater.  She did fulfill a valid function as well as many criticized duties that were out of the scope of an un-elected or un-hired official at the White House.  I personally believe that she would have been positioned politically much better if Bill had actually given her a real job based on her qualifications at the time, but he was a centrist President and not one for actually progressing the country forward when it came to sexual equality.