Here is a look at how Hillary Clinton thought about three issues which were important to her.

She won her senate seat the same day Gore lost the presidential race despite winning the popular vote. For a short while after that, changing the election system was a popular issue. From the NY Times Nov 11, 2000: "I have thought about this for a long time. I've always thought we had outlived the need for an Electoral College, and now that I am going to the Senate, I am going to try to do what I can to make clear that the popular vote, the will of the people, should be followed." Anyone with much understanding of the constitution knows it is nearly impossible to get rid of the electoral college, since it benefits numerous small-population states which would block the amendment process. The new senator did not have that understanding. If she had done real creative thinking, she might have come up with idea now being pursued of having large states deciding on their own to give their votes to the national popular winner, but she didn't, and when the issue fell out of fashion, so did her interest.

In 1993-1994 she was appointed by her president husband to head The Task Force on National Health Care Reform. I think that the foremost reason health costs have increased so much is that having insurance takes away incentive for the consumer to contain costs, or to make decisions based on price. Any system which extends health insurance should carefully consider this effect. But on her tour to drum up support for her plan, she choose a sample case which could not have more clearly shown her ignorance of this basic consideration. She bemoaned the case of a middle-income family deciding not to spend $1100 on anesthesia when the mother gave birth to her sixth child. Clinton thought universal health care should cover it, presumably saving us all money.

As for the Iraq war, first from her speech in support of the October 2002 resolution authorizing it: "This is probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make -- any vote that may lead to war should be hard -- but I cast it with conviction." It didn't take any extraordinary intelligence to know that Bush was exaggerating the case for war, or that efforts would likely bog down, or that Saddam Hussein/Al Qaeda links were extremely far-fetched. Voting for the Iraq War was lame -- I think in the case of Clinton and most in the legislative branch, simply a politically cowardly act. As of her appearance on the Larry King show in April 2004, more than a year after the start of war, she hadn't let the lack of WMDs change her mind on the vote: "Obviously, I've thought about that a lot in the months since. No, I don't regret giving the president authority because at the time it was in the context of weapons of mass destruction, grave threats to the United States, and clearly, Saddam Hussein had been a real problem for the international community for more than a decade." Now in late 2006, with public opinion against the war, her political cowardice led her a new direction on the December 19 2006 Today show: "If we knew then what we know now, there wouldn't have been a vote, and I certainly wouldn't have voted that way." Brittany Spears said we should all just trust the president; with her Iraq vote, Clinton apparently was Spears' intellectual equal, and now deflects responsibility: "I'm not going to believe this president again, I did that once, a lot of us did, and it hasn't turned out very well."

On all three of these cases her statements are politically expedient and show no understanding of the very most basic considerations which must be undertaken. Her saying she's thought so much about things is no substitute for evidence she can.