I wondered, when I heard Clinton say this at the Austin, Texas debate what kind of negotiating power the spouse of the president has to be out negotiating arrangements with leaders or dignitaries of other countries. I wondered about it again today when I saw that Clinton, amazingly, is trying to tout her own foreign policy experience by piggybacking off her husband's experience. So I looked up a little of this and made a clip of the relevant statement, in which she was asked by a Univision reporter why she thought Obama wouldn't be a good president.

First up, going to another country for a photo op, and especially one that is staged, is NOT negotiating arrangments with another country.

The wife of U.S. President Bill Clinton toured the refugee camps of Macedonia on Friday, listening to uprooted Kosovars' tales of a forced exodus from the Serbian province where they once lived....

The New York Times of May 15, 1999 mentions the photo op.

In a refugee camp appearance so carefully scripted that Administration officials chose which refugees Mrs. Clinton would speak with, she commiserated with Kosovo's expelled masses

WHO does she give credit to?

But the essential issue remains when the roughly 200,000 refugees here might return to Kosovo. 

''We are trying very hard to permit you to return to your homes in safety,'' Mrs. Clinton said. ''That's what my husband, the United States Government and the NATO allies are trying to accomplish.''

Here's a reference to Clinton and Cherie Booth meeting a Kosovo refugee. So she's on the same level here, not as, say, a secretary of state, but the wife of Tony Blair.

Now, everyone knows that was that 1999 was the year she was planning to go move to New York to run for Senate. But it's quite disingenuous for her to claim it was SHE that negotiated the border situation just because she TOURED there and got a photo op.

If there is more to it, I sure can't find it and welcome people to post sourced articles that show that it was, in fact, Hillary Clinton who was the active negotiator in this situation, rather than, say, Richard Holbrooke.

Perhaps it would take her actually RELEASING the records about her time as First Lady that the National Archives are waiting to let go, pending a simple okay from her husband, so that we could go look for ourselves. I'm thinking she doesn't want us to see that quite yet since it would show what an empty suit she is.

UPDATE. From the AP Today

Robert Gelbard, who was presidential envoy to the Balkans at the time and now serves as an adviser to the Obama campaign, offers an opposing view.

"I cannot recall any involvement by Senator Clinton in this issue," he said. "The person who was able to get the border opened was Mrs. Sadako Ogata," the U.N. high commissioner for refugees. Gelbard said he had questioned other U.S. officials directly involved and none remembered involvement by Clinton.

There were no public reports at the time of Clinton negotiating to keep the border open.

Overall, said Gelbard, "She had more of a role on some foreign policy issues than a lot of other first ladies, including, for example, the current one. My own firsthand experience, though, is that her role was limited and I've been surprised at the claims that she had a much greater role than certainly I'm aware of on the issues I was working on."

P.S Here's what Obama has said about her foreign policy experience. Perhaps some of the media that have been sucking up to her after her Po Po Me Act last week will take note and see how 1 this is.

"I think that this week she made a series of arguments about why she would be a superior candidate," Obama told reporters during a press conference on his campaign plane. "She made the experience argument that she's been making repeatedly, particularly around foreign policy and her ability to handle a crisis. And so I think its important to examine that claim and not just allow her to assert it, which is think has been going on for quite some time."

Pointing to Clinton's foreign policy experience, he questioned how tangible it really was.

"I know she talks about visiting 80 countries. It's not clear, ya know, was she negotiating treaties or agreements or was she handling crises during this period of time? My sense is the answer is no," he said.