Assessing Clinton's "Experience"

In her race to win the democratic nomination against a first-term Senator from Illinois, Hillary Clinton has put the criterion of experience front and center. She often references what she says is 35 years of work that qualifies her to run the country. And the most important achievements Clinton cites are the ones she claims from her years as First Lady — a job that carries no portfolio but can wield enormous influence.

The nature of Hillary Clinton's involvement was always a matter of great sensitivity in her husband's White House. After her disastrous 1994 foray into health-care reform, Bill Clinton's aides went out of their way to downplay her role in Administration decision making. She rarely appeared at meetings in which officials hashed out important policy trade-offs, but when the discussion centered on issues that were among her priorities, she sent her aides — much the way Vice President Al Gore did. "There were certain issues they kind of owned," recalls Gene Sperling, who headed economic policy in the Clinton White House. The First Lady's top concerns, he says, were children's issues, health care, and foster-care and adoption policies.

Now the former First Lady claims at least a share of the credit for a wide range of the Clinton Administration's signature accomplishments, both domestic and overseas. Does she deserve it? The Clinton and Obama campaigns spent this week arguing that question with dueling memos and talking points.

TIME decided to cut through the spin with a series that will take a closer look at the claims candidates make. As Senator Clinton is fond of saying, It's time to get real. We kick off the series by evaluating three of the achievements she mentions most often:

Children's Health Care

WHAT SHE SAYS
One of her biggest achievements, Clinton often tells voters, is the multibillion-dollar health-care program that provides coverage for children whose parents are too rich for Medicaid but unable to afford health insurance on their own. As one of her campaign ads puts it, "She changed the lives of 6 million kids when she championed the bill that gave them health insurance."

After comprehensive health-care reform went down to defeat in 1994, Clinton and other health-care advocates looked for targeted changes that might win more support. The most likely seemed the issue of providing coverage to children of the working poor. In October 1996, Senator Edward Kennedy introduced a bill to do just that, financed with a 75¢ cigarette-tax increase; in his State of the Union address the following January, Bill Clinton announced a plan to cover 5 million kids.

It was one of several health policies Clinton proposed, including one that would expand coverage for the unemployed. Internally, according to one former White House aide, the First Lady argued that the White House should keep its focus on the more politically popular plan to focus on children.

In May 1997, however, when then Senate majority leader Trent Lott said the children's health plan would blow up their balanced-budget deal, the President abruptly changed course and actively lobbied Democratic lawmakers to vote against it. As a result, the provision failed, and Kennedy was furious at what he considered a betrayal. Hillary defended her husband's decision, telling one audience, "He had to safeguard the budget proposal."

The measure was resurrected a month later, largely through the efforts of Kennedy and Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, who worked behind the scenes on Capitol Hill and built a coalition of children's advocacy groups to bring public pressure on Congress to pass the measure. Kennedy also privately pressed the First Lady to use her influence at the White House. After Bill Clinton signed the bill into law that August, Kennedy said at a press conference, "Mrs. Clinton ... was of invaluable help, both in the fashioning and the shaping of the program and also as a clear advocate."

THE BOTTOM LINE: The record suggests Clinton did indeed lobby for children's health coverage but that many others were responsible as well. And it also shows that her husband nearly killed the idea before it ever got off the ground.