Hillary Clinton unveiled a new advertisement today, which you can find below. Its thrust is "change," but the new theme of her campaign is a mashup of "change" and "experience." As HRC said in New Hampshire this weekend:

"'Change' is just a word without the strength and experience to make it happen. And I know some people think you have to choose between change and experience. Well, with me you don't have to choose."

So far this "experience" theme seems to be keeping Hillary in the lead over Barack Obama. But what does she really mean when she talks about "experience"? Given that Hillary has spent just over one (cautious) term in the Senate, she's clearly talking about her time as First Lady (and to a lesser extent as First Lady of Arkansas). Yet Hillary actually says very little about the particulars of her White House years. She and her surrogates frequently refer to the 82 nations she's visited. And all the "work" she's done on important issues. But apart from her failed health care reform--which for obvious reasons she doesn't emphasize--Hillary almost never talks about sitting in on her husband's key policy meetings, or otherwise shaping substantial components of his agenda. Whereas one of the surprising things I discovered when I wrote my recent piece about Hillary's foreign policy was just how engaged and influential she was on those issues during the 90s. I found that she played an important role in pressuring her husband to bomb Bosnia and, especially, Kosovo. And yet one rarely hears her talking about such episodes in specific terms--if ever. Why not? Probably because right now Hillary gets to have it both ways: She enjoys this vague claim to "experience," without getting bogged down in specific issues, because people only have foggy notions of her role as First Lady. (I haven't thoroughly read the two new biographies about her but if they clearly answer this question few reviewers have mentioned it; a quick skim of Bernstein's book suggests that he mostly focuses on her scandal-management.) So here's an idea for Barack Obama: Start pressing Hillary for some specifics about all this experience--particularly on issues that might rile up the party's base. What role did she play in her husband's decision to sign the welfare reform bill? Did she have anything to do with NAFTA? What did she have to say when her husband reached a 1997 balanced-budget deal with Republicans--a deal that Richard Gephardt blasted as a sellout? And if she claims to have been out of the loop on those issues, well, then should she be claiming all this "experience"? Who knows if that would work. But it seems to me that right now Hillary is getting all the benefits of being "experienced" without really having to defend many of the particulars that experience entails. Meanwhile, here's her new ad: And here's the theme song for this post: --Michael Crowley