… is that experience knows what it’s talking about. Take a look at the video from the Hanford Site controversy that Michelle covered yesterday, and see the difference in responses when people question Barack Obama and John McCain about it. McCain responds crisply, aware of the difficulties in and the billions Congress has already spent on the clean-up efforts at the nuclear production facility in Washington, now closed. Barack Obama stammers through an admission that he has no clue about the controversy (via David All):

In fact, here’s the Obama response in transcript form:

Here’s something that you will rarely hear from a politician, and that is that I’m not familiar with the Hanford, uuuuhh, site, so I don’t know exactly what’s going on there. (Applause.) Now, having said that, I promise you I’ll learn about it by the time I leave here on the ride back to the airport.

Here’s something we hear all the time about politicians; Obama doesn’t read legislation before voting on it. Third Wave Dave discovers that Obama voted on a bill in 2005 that specifically dealt with the clean-up effort at Hanford. HR 1815’s summary reads as follows:

Section 3114 –
Directs the Secretary to submit to the defense and appropriations committees any reports received from the Army Corps of Engineers evaluating costs, schedules, and technical issues associated with the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant Project at the DOE Hanford Site.

Obama voted in favor of HR 1815 in Senate Vote 360, and it passed easily, 95-0, with McCain ironically not in attendance. Even Obama’s own Senate website shows this vote. Does Obama routinely cast votes without having a clue about the issue at hand? And does his campaign staff have no idea how to prepare their candidate for regional appearances, by at least reminding him that he’s supposed to know about Hanford?

The comparison here is obvious. One man in this video has prepared himself for the office of the presidency by doing the job he has now. The other one has been sleepwalking his way through his first term in the Senate.