Clinton's supporters also tout her 1995 speech in Beijing as perhaps her most visible foreign policy success. Resisting calls by some within the Clinton administration that she not go, Hillary Clinton attended the Fourth World Conference on Women. There she declared: "It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights."
The speech was the then-strongest criticism of China by a Clinton administration official. It drew cheers from the women's movement and human-rights communities.
Obama's campaign credits it as "a good speech," but nevertheless contends that it hardly constituted a "3 a.m. crisis."
"It is strange that Senator Clinton would base her own foreign policy experience on a speech that she gave over a decade ago, since she so frequently belittles Barack Obama's speech opposing the Iraq war six years ago," wrote Greg Craig, a former State Department policy planning director, in a Tuesday Obama campaign memo.
