Obama; Experience

Obama is hitting back hard against the charge that he is too "inexperienced" to be president.

Obama said Clinton and other candidates appeared experienced because they were just saying what is traditionally expected of a candidate.

"There is, not just with Senator Clinton, but with a lot of my opponents, a premium on reciting the conventional wisdom in Washington and that's what passes for experience -- how well you do that," Obama told reporters during a five-day tour of Iowa.

"My argument in this race is, it's that kind of rote approach to foreign policy that led a lot of people who should have known better to get into Iraq," he said. "It is an approach that we have to change in a much more far-reaching fashion."

This is good. At some point, the Republicans are going to start characterizing this intra-party conflict as a weakness in the Democratic Party. They will start using words like "disunity" and "chaos." Let them.

The Democratic Party is sorting out which candidate will have the honor of slaughtering the GOP in the 2008 presidential election. There is nothing abnormal or unhealthy about this process. This is politics. The candidates will fight it out, and the one who makes the best case to Democratic primary voters will get the nomination. And then that person will become president of the United States. This is as it should be. We are trying to select the best of several excellent candidates.

The Republicans, on the other hand, are just trying to settle on the least-bad option from a pack of truly embarrassing specimens. Their experiences have not equipped them to lead a troop of boy scouts, much less the greatest nation on earth. Republicans are sparing no energy slandering our candidates because they can't think of anything positive to say about theirs.

The winning candidate will be the one who fights as if his - or her - political life depends on it, because it does.