In a flap that has shifted the Democratic 2008 presidential race to a more negative tone, Barack Obama yesterday said Hillary Clinton was showing bad judgment for refusing to consider a dramatic change in US foreign policy.
Visiting the early voting state of Iowa, Mr Obama kept up the attack on Ms Clinton in a dispute that has lasted all week over whether the next president to be elected in November 2008 should be prepared to meet leaders of hostile nations like Iran, Cuba, Syria, North Korea and Venezuela.
Ms Clinton, leading in the Democratic contest, considers the first-term senator from Illinois naive for saying he would be willing to meet the troublesome leaders, while Mr Obama thinks Ms Clinton is sticking to the foreign policy status quo of the much-criticized Bush administration.
"So often in Washington, experience means doing what we've been doing over and over and over again. Well, to me that's not experience if what you're doing isn't working," Mr Obama told a crowd on a farm in Adel, a field of corn behind him.
"It's bad judgment and if you want to show good judgment, then you've got to be open to changing the way we do things in order to get different outcomes," he said.
Ms Clinton, a two-term senator from New York and former first lady, did not back down from her belief that any meetings with the leaders should be preceded by lower-level diplomacy to make sure there is a reason for the leaders to meet.
But at a campaign event in West Virginia, she stressed that her diplomacy would be more expansive than that of the the Bush White House, saying "we will get back to working with other countries."