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GOP Senator: A 'Stretch' To Say Palin Is Qualified

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Sep 18, 2008 11:00 am US/Eastern

GOP Senator: A 'Stretch' To Say Palin Is Qualified

Campaign '08 Complete Coverage

About The Candidates & Issues

WASHINGTON (AP) ―

Click to enlarge 1 of 1: Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska, speaks about his political ambitions during a press conference March 12, 2007.
AP

Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel said his party's vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, lacks foreign policy experience and called it a "stretch" to say she's qualified to be president.

"She doesn't have any foreign policy credentials," Hagel said in an interview published Thursday by the Omaha World-Herald. "You get a passport for the first time in your life last year? I mean, I don't know what you can say. You can't say anything."

Palin visited soldiers in Kuwait and Germany last year. She said in an interview with ABC News that her only other foreign travel was to Mexico and Canada. She also said she had never met a foreign head of state.

Hagel, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been a vocal critic of the Bush administration since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In July, Hagel traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Though he didn't expect to be asked, Hagel had said he would have considered serving as Obama's running mate.

Palin was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, population 6,500, before becoming Alaska's governor in December 2006.

Hagel told the newspaper that other governors have been elected to serve in the White House without experience in Washington. He said judgment and character were also important for the job.

"But I do think in a world that is so complicated, so interconnected and so combustible, you really got to have some people in charge that have some sense of the bigger scope of the world," Hagel said. "I think that's just a requirement."

Could Palin lead the country if GOP presidential nominee John McCain could not?

"I think it's a stretch to, in any way, to say that she's got the experience to be president of the United States," Hagel said.