At Saturday night's presidential debate, Sen. Hillary Clinton touted her experience. "I've been making positive changes in people's lives for 35 years," Clinton said.
But Clinton has been an elected official for seven years, and has been in the national spotlight since 1992. How does she arrive at that figure?
In October, The Hill investigated:
The experience clock for Sen. Clinton, according to her public statements, started in 1972 as a private attorney in Arkansas for Marian Wright Edelman, who subsequently founded the Children’s Defense Fund.
In her 2003 memoir, Living History, Clinton writes that her primary assignment “was to gather information about the Nixon Administration’s failure to enforce the legal ban on granting tax-exempt status to the private segregated academies that had sprung up in the South to avoid integrated public schools.”
Later that year she went to Texas with then-boyfriend Bill Clinton to lead the voter registration drive for George McGovern’s presidential campaign.
Citing experience as a non-elected official can be tricky, according to some analysts. While her campaign has suggested that she played a major role in her husband’s leadership of Arkansas and later of the country, she wasn’t elected to office until 2000.
Few question that Clinton gathered relevant experience when she traveled to 78 countries as first lady.
In your opinion, does Hillary Clinton have 35 years of public-service experience?
Thoughts