Last week, Bloomberg News’ Mark Halperin asked a panel of Iowa Democrats to name one accomplishment from Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. Just one little accomplishment… One? Something? ANYTHING?

A grand total of zero panel members could recall a single noteworthy accomplishment of Mrs. Clinton’s. But we should cut them some slack because they’re not wrong.

To date, Hillary Clinton has done nothing notable aside from being married to a President, serving as a perfectly forgettable and ineffective Senator, and begrudgingly stepping aside in 2008 to make way for the Obama Presidency. She also pushed some button in Russia, and that seems to be going just swell.

Do winning elections and screwing up major diplomatic relations constitute resume-worthy fodder?

Carly Fiorina said it best shortly after Hillary made her official 2016 candidacy announcement, “Hillary Clinton’s a highly intelligent woman, hardworking, she’s dedicated her life to public service but unfortunately she does not have a track record of accomplishment or transparency.”

Expecting a Commander in Chief to have some kind of accomplishments that show their qualifications before getting hired for the job is reasonable, right? Maybe, just not if those accomplishments happened while serving has the head of the State Department, according to U.S. News and World Report’s Susan Milligan.

On Hardball with Chris Matthews’ Milligan said the question posed to the Iowa Democratic panel was “unfair.”

“I think most people could not look at a Secretary of State and point to an accomplishment. Frankly, mostly what a Secretary of State does is keep something from becoming a massive crisis so, that in a way wasn’t a terribly fair question,” said Milligan.

There’s an entire political strategy discussion here that we’ll save for another time. Suffice it to say, an accomplishment deficit isn’t necessarily an electoral detriment as long as people like you one vote more than the other guy.

But in this particular case Chris Matthews makes a solid closing argument, “Obama didn’t have a big accomplishment before he got elected.” Exactly. And we all know how well that’s gone.

[h/t MRC]

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