Democratic Sen. Barack Obama defended his foreign policy credentials on Thursday, saying Sen. Hillary Clinton and other rivals were trying to pass off entrenched Washington ways as experience.Obama, a first-term U.S. senator from Illinois, has been hit by accusations he is too inexperienced to be the Democratic nominee for the November 2008 election. A new CBS poll shows that while Obama is seen as the candidate offering fresh new ideas, Clinton has a 20-point advantage partly because respondents think she has the right experience to be president.
The New York senator has called Obama naive and irresponsible for saying he would talk with leaders of hostile nations, for favoring strikes against al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan and for ruling out nuclear weapons in such attacks.
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."