Hillary Clinton is incomparable to Barack Obama. Barack Obama is a much better candidate.

-Experience. It's always funny to hear people complain about Hillary Clinton having done nothing during her husband's presidency. It was a running joke throughout most of the 90s that it was really Hillary running the nation. That's certainly an exaggeration, but it speaks to the point that she was most definitely intimately involved in the policy decisions of the executive branch, even if only in an unofficial regard as a personal advisor to the president. She didn't have any official role in deciding policy; but to say that her role was "the equivalent of an intern" is to completely turn around all the conventional wisdom of the 90s, and my opponent certainly needs cited facts to back up this claim, and he has provided nothing of the sort. But if you really want to blow off all her time as First Lady, you have to take Obama's state legislature experience out of consideration as well. Neither had any official role in governing the United States – one was part of a state government, which is a much smaller scope, and the other had an unofficial White House role – so neither of these count if you want either of them not to count. In that case, we look to experience in the Senate as the most important way to judge this point. And in this, my opponent either consciously chose to be deceitful, or doesn't understand the workings of the Senate. Anyone can cosponsor legislation, and it really doesn't mean anything. Take, for instance, the fact that the Democratic Senate leadership's foreclosure legislation on the docket for later consideration currently has 25 cosponsors – a full quarter of the Senate! Being one among a few dozen cosponsors of Senate legislation is, in short, insignificant and irrelevant to the discussion of experience. The numbers I provided and cited, therefore, are the only solid evidence that has been presented for consideration under Experience. Clinton has a slight advantage on all counts of activity in the Senate; take that coupled with the fact that she's been in the Senate for twice as long, and it's clear that she wins this point. -Iraq. When you are an elected official in a position in which the fate of the nation depends upon your decisions, it is only natural to take any potential threat to the people you serve more seriously than most people would. Barack Obama could make as many speeches as he wanted about Iraq; in the end, he was not accountable to the American people for his opinion, so he didn't have to carefully weigh every factor. Hillary Clinton was accountable; and the political pressure from the people, who overwhelmingly supported military action against Iraq, along with the intelligence provided to her by the Bush Administration, brought her to the carefully weighted decision that the authorization to use military force against Iraq was proper. In the end, it turned out to be a poor decision, but if we expect infallibility we're fooling ourselves. They have both, as I stated before, continuously voted to keep funding the war. Despite what my opponent says, this is a strike against both of them in terms of handling the war. Defense appropriations are only voted on a couple times a year; and at any given point in time whatsoever, there are always several months of funding already appropriated to defense. Pulling the plug on Iraq funding would not, as my opponent tries to claim, deprive the troops of guns or armor, as they have several months of guns and armor funding already appropriated to them; all it would do is put the pressure on the president to begin withdrawing troops immediately, before the money that is already appropriated runs out. Everyone in Washington knows this, including Barack Obama; so the fact that he has continued to vote for war funding is the only solid, proven way we can judge his views on the war. The natural conclusion is that, while he probably legitimately wants to bring the troops home, his passion in this regard is not anywhere near what he makes it out to be. -Detail of proposals. My opponent didn't really respond to what I had to say on this point; he just said over again what he said the first time. See my Round 1 argument for my points here. -Compromise and bipartisanship. Again, my opponent has not refuted anything I said in Round 1. Look to Obama's voting record (listed as the most liberal in the Senate in 2007!) and the fact that no one person can change a fundamental Washington reality like partisan division to the extent that Obama says he will. And the claim that "Obama has been able to get so many bills passed" is laughable; all he's been able to do is attach his name as a cosponsor to a lot of good legislation, which, as I said, doesn't mean anything. -Health care mandate. I have thoroughly explained the justification for this. My opponent only really says that the source I used that said Obama's plan would only give coverage to half of the uninsured is an over-exaggeration. But the author of that very detailed study is a health care economist at MIT who has been writing about such things for years, and my opponent has not provided any studies that say anything to the contrary. In the absence of any other evidence, I'd say it's safe to trust an MIT health care economist to judge the economics of a health care plan. -Withdrawal from Iraq. What my opponent said this round is essentially true, that "Obama has agreed to what Clinton has." They both want the same end result, and their proposals would go about it in almost identical ways. The only difference is that Clinton wants to give her commanders and advisors a deadline for hammering out a plan to withdraw. -Meeting with foreign leaders. Here, my opponent once again fails to respond to what I had to say. Obama conceded a few months ago that before any direct talks between the president and an unfriendly nation should take place, "preparations" must be made, meaning diplomacy should essentially be normalized with the nation in question. Hillary Clinton attacked him on the naivety of his original concept (that the president should just go talk to anyone), and he conceded the point. -Negative campaigning. How about the Obama mail-outs that claimed Hillary Clinton said that NAFTA was a "boon" to the economy? FALSE. Or his claim that a cabinet-level official from her husband's presidency had said Obama's health care plan was better? FALSE. How about his response to the controversy over his "bitter" comments, where he turned his speech quickly into a series of attacks against both Clinton and McCain? NEGATIVE. What about his advisor's closed-door talks with the Canadians, where they were assured that Obama's opposition to NAFTA was just politics; or the interview with Europeans where an advisor said that Obama as president might handle Iraq differently than Obama as a candidate speaks of handling it? DECEITFUL. These are just a few examples, but they are sufficient to demonstrate that despite everything Obama says about offering a new kind of politics, he really is just the same, and it's impossible not to be. As I said before, political campaigns are by their very nature negative, since the purpose is to convince the people that you're better than your opponent. -"Yes we can." Sounds wonderful; but right now in America, we need a doer, not a talker. Eloquence in speaking is a moot point to this debate; after all, would Hitler be a good president for us today, simply because he was charismatic and a good speaker? I plead with the American people, to vote with their minds based upon who is the better candidate, rather than just how good it feels to listen to the person speak. Hillary Clinton is more experienced, offers "Here's how we can"s rather than "Yes we can"s, has a better health care plan, has a more concrete Iraq plan, and is just as good if not better than Barack Obama in all the areas his campaign seeks to portray as his strong points. Hillaru Clinton is the better candidate of the two.