Slate's John Dickerson asks an obvious question on a conference call with Hillary Clinton's campaign: "What foreign policy moment would you point to in Hillary's career where she's been tested by crisis?" After an uncomfortably long moment during which neither Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson and Lee Feinstein have anything to say, and then Lee Feinstein tries to step in with a save and starts talking about Clinton's endorsement by high-level military officials. Give it a listen:

That's a hat tip to Jennifer Skalka. Feinstein, the campaign's foreign policy guy, is making the best of a bad situation here. But the more strictly political people walked into a debacle. How could they go forward with that ad without having a good answer to the question on hand? It's inept in the extreme.

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