In the last hours before the crucial mini-SuperTuesday Democrartic primary voting, the “experience” candidate stoops to War on Terror messaging: “Vote Hillary to protect the poor cuddly kids!” Sorry, but no. This ad demonstrates everything that’s wrong with the kind of experience Hillary is so proud of acquiring. As Slate points out, she didn’t keep anyone’s kids safe when the phone really did ring in her Washington office and she voted with the Congressional hawks to invade Iraq, riding the post 9-11 wave of wrongheaded but popular national security politics. That vote was no fluke, no one-time mistake. In the last year, during the tough primary campaign, Hillary has demonstrated time and again that, when the pressure is on, she will always stoop to politics instead of leadership. As the Obama campaign has gained momentum, Hillary has increasingly turned negative, purposefully overplaying phoney charges about his unwillingness to debate her, disingenuously calling him a plagiarist, leaking stories about his drug use and connections to sixties radicals and likely distributing photos of him in traditional Kenyan attire that included robes and a turban. Given that the Bush Administration has made a mess of the country by repeatedly playing up fears of terrorism whenever it has felt the need to make political capital— which it is doing again right now in its struggle to pass expanded spying legislation— given all that, Hillary’s bad-taste fear-mongering ad couldn’t be more misguided. All it demonstrates is how much of mere politics as usual Hillary has learned from all her vaunted experience.