To explore the likely future performance of candidates Obama and Clinton (while she was still in the race), Steve Clemons of the Washington, DC-based New America Foundation decided late last year to study closely how each handled their committee assignments as US Senators.

"I thought Hillary Clinton did not have the patience and that Obama was probably very involved in committee processes," said Clemons, who directs the Foundation’s American Strategy Program and previously worked in the Senate. "In fact I found the opposite. I watched videos of Superfund hearings and there was Clinton the whole time, all during the campaign, three or four times, asking questions. I went to find the Obama videos and there were none."

Clemons, who also writes a popular blog, was the first to publicize the fact that, despite receiving the plum assignment of chairing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's subcommittee on Europe after the November 2006 midterm elections, Senator Obama had not held a single policy hearing of this subcommittee, even though it could have offered a platform both for bolstering his foreign-policy credentials and for putting pressure on the Bush administration to back up its rhetoric about multilateralism with actual consultation and action.

"His subcommittee deals with Europe, with NATO, with various related political and security matters -- and he's got the gavel and can set the agenda," Clemons wrote in his first post on the subject on Dec. 17. "Given the stress NATO is experiencing today on many fronts -- from the question of Europe's evolving security identity, to NATO's deployments in Afghanistan, to the evolving question of how to deal with Russia, Kosovo, and other common challenges -- it seems inconceivable that Senator Obama would not want to highlight important policy concerns by way of hearings."

Clemons also found that Obama had not made a single visit to continental Europe as senator -- though he had visited Great Britain as part of a delegation.

"I had this interesting encounter at the time with one of Obama’s Europe advisers," Clemons told SPIEGEL ONLINE last week. "She said, 'I know. We were trying to get him to go to Europe and it just wasn’t a priority.'"

The Times of London followed up with an article quoting Clemons saying, "The major threats in the 21st century are changing but what is not changing is the vital necessity of Europe and the US collaborating in meeting those challenges with Europe, for instance, in the lead on dealing with Iran. This is a very disconcerting void in Obama’s profile." The article concluded: "Mr. Obama also met Mr. Blair twice in Washington, and Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French interior minister. But anecdotes are circulating in Washington about how he has turned down requests from other visiting foreign dignitaries, such as an Italian opposition leader who was told that the senator was in 'presidential mode' and only seeing leaders of countries..." LINK