Editorial: Hillary Clinton has the experience to lead

Hillary Rodham was a politically active college student in 1968 when she and a friend went to downtown Chicago to attend the Democratic National Convention.

That election year, like this one, was one for the ages, and Rodham would witness the Chicago Police descend with tear gas and truncheons on unruly students protesting the Vietnam War in Grant Park.

“The police officers’ brazen display of violence against young protesters stunned her,” wrote Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. in their unauthorized biography “Her Way.”

Even then, however, Rodham saw the world through mature eyes.

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“She was also turned off by the other side: young people who attempted to change the world through violence masquerading as ‘civil disobedience,’” wrote her biographers.

The point here is that Hillary Rodham Clinton has been doing this for a long time: seeing the world through a political lens and revealing an uncommon solidity of judgment and perspective.

Where Hillary Clinton stands on the issues:

One of the most experienced candidates (ever)

This week, she has taken a commanding lead in the Democratic Party primary, and she is almost certain to be her party’s nominee for president of the United States.

More than a turn in the race, this is one of the great achievements in American political history.

Hillary Clinton deserves her due.

Not just because she has risen higher than any woman in American politics, but because she is by far the most experienced candidate of any of those running in either party this year. In fact, she is one of the most experienced people to ever run for president.

Clinton’s record of achievement is long and storied. She was a top student in college who went on to Yale Law School and to practice law. She served as first lady in the Clinton White House with an ambition to tackle huge national and global problems — universal health care and women’s rights.

After the White House, she won a seat in the U.S. Senate and represented the state of New York for eight years. She ran for president and lost to Barack Obama, who turned around and made her his secretary of State.

In four years on that job, she traveled to 112 countries, more than any of her predecessors.

Now, she once again seeks the presidency in a primary in which her opponent seems to get all the buzz.

Bernie Sanders, the enigma

Bernie Sanders is an enigma, a socialist round peg in the very square Senate.

When he announced his candidacy, it seemed nothing more than a messaging campaign, a tilted lance at a little extra airtime for gimcrack socialist ideas.

Who knew he would become the idol of young America, beloved for his thriving white hair that could climb the bricks at Harvard Yard?

Sanders has been a delight, a good-natured scrapper who would never allow the Democratic race to descend into the cesspool that is the 2016 Republican primary.

He has ignited the imagination of young people, who saw in him someone who cares about them and their unique struggles in facing a world with fewer jobs and more debt than previous generations.

Sanders has been good for American politics and good for Clinton, who needed a challenge, not a coronation. He has made her a better candidate.

The race isn’t over, but the math now stalks Sanders. His days of viability are numbered.

Idealism is nice, but realism matters

Clinton will win this race because of qualities she showed as a young woman. While Sanders went off into fantasy land, offering free college to students and a single-payer health-care system, Clinton kept it anchored, proposing subsidized college educations while not tossing the entire bill to taxpayers.

Sanders would add $18 trillion in new spending to a government already badly bloated and in need of budget discipline, according to the Wall Street Journal. Sanders disputes that number, but in an age when entitlement reform is an urgent necessity, Sanders wants to expand entitlements.

Clinton is more real. She proposes large spending of her own, $350 billion on higher education, but requires contributions from students, parents and states. She seems to grasp, more than Sanders, that the American treasury is stressed.

On foreign policy, she is far better equipped to lead than Sanders. Her relationships with world figures would be invaluable in framing America’s outreach beyond our shores. She is reticent to put American troops on the in highly charged conflicts in the Middle East, preferring instead to leave the ground fighting to Middle Eastern allies.

Clinton has been a controversial figure for decades, entangled in scandal for much of her public life.

A battle-tested candidate

Very early on, she and Bill Clinton faced congressional hearings and investigation on Whitewater, a failed investment that raised questions about their integrity.

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, she was drawn into the Monica Lewinsky scandal and endured years of ridicule and harsh coverage of her family.

As secretary of State, she was grilled in congressional hearings for the way she dealt with the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi.

And more recently, she remains under the legal cloud and uncertainty of her use of a private server as secretary of State that became the receptacle of classified emails.

Clinton has been accused of cutting corners and making up her own rules. She is fiercely disliked in many corners of this country, viewed as a divisive figure.

But few people engaged in the large policy debates of our land could withstand the kind of public scrutiny Clinton has endured during her near-lifetime of public service. She carries with her the battle scars of conflicts and accusations that have diminished her over the years. She has struggled in this campaign to win over some Democrats who distrust her.

But she is also battle-tested, hardened by the fierce political infighting and partisanship that consumes political life in this country.

Her enemies, and they are legion, have sought to tear her down. But she is still standing, and on the cusp of the highest office in the land.

She has the mettle to be president. The sound judgment to be commander in chief.

For that reason, The Arizona Republic recommends when Arizonans vote in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, they vote for Hillary Clinton.