Question du jour : Qui a le plus d’expérience internationale ? Barack Obama qui a vécu de 6 a 10 ans en Indonésie ou Hillary Clinton qui a été première des Etats-Unis pendant huit années.
La guerre en Irak et plus généralement les questions internationales sont la préoccupation majeure des électeurs démocrates actuellement (les républicains se focalisant plus sur les questions de sécurité intérieure et d’immigration), la crédibilité internationale des candidats démocrates devrait donc influer leur choix.
Si Barack Obama souffre d’un certain manque d’expérience dans ce domaine il est toutefois étonnant qu’Hillary Clinton apparaisse
expérimentée principalement parce qu’elle a rencontré des chefs d’Etats quand son mari était Président.
Voir par exemple sa réponse portant sur la capacité d’une femme à être Présidente et à représenter les Etats-Unis auprès des pays arabes
lors du débat démocrate du 23 juillet 2006.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TNTcPtnERI
A ce sujet je vous recommande un article du NY Times de ce jour.
SHENANDOAH, Iowa, Nov. 20 — Fog may have diverted Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s plane from her campaign stop here on Tuesday, but that did not prevent her from continuing
her attacks on Senator Barack Obama’s experience.
It was an odd moment. Mrs. Clinton, her voice piped in over a sound system, apologized for missing the event, expressed concern about the safety of food and toys from overseas and, pivoting off the overseas topic, tweaked Mr. Obama for saying on Monday that living overseas as a child had increased his experience in foreign relations.
Mrs. Clinton, who this week in Iowa has been making an issue of Mr. Obama’s experience, said the next president would face two wars and fraying alliances. She said she had traveled broadly and had “met with countless world leaders” and knew many of them personally.
“Now voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges that the next president will face,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I think we need a president with more experience than that.”
That was apparently a response to Mr. Obama’s citing his years in Indonesia as a child as contributing to his knowledge “of how ordinary people in these other countries live.”
“I sit on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” he said. “So I have frequent interaction with world leaders who come to visit here, and I take trips on various fact-finding missions, whether it’s to Iraq or Russia or Africa. But you know, probably, the strongest experience I have in foreign relations is the fact that I spent four years living overseas when I was a child in Southeast Asia.”
Bill Burton, a spokesman for Mr. Obama, said in response to Mrs. Clinton: “Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld have spent time in the White House and traveled to many countries as well. But along with Hillary Clinton, they led us into the worst foreign policy disaster in a generation.”
