In an interview with Sean Hannity, aired on Fox News yesterday, Mitt Romney made a serious mistake. During the course of a discussion about the qualifications of Hillary Clinton, he used the word “intern.” Not only that, but he used it to make a valid point that had nothing to do with her husband or embarrasing public scandals.

What he said was, “And I think the greatest drawback, beyond the direction she’d take us, is that she’s never run anything. She’s never had the occasion of being in the private sector running a business or, for that matter, running a state or a city. She hasn’t run anything.

And the government of the United States is not a place for a president to be an intern. You need to have experience actually leading and running things.”

So the Clinton tag team did what it does best. It got offended.

On MSNBC Live this morning, Andrea Mitchell decided to ask Howard Wolfson, a Clinton insider, about the comment and Romney’s intent.

Mitchell: “This is not the first time he’s used the word ‘intern’ in reference to Senator Clinton’s alleged lack of qualifications, so it’s an intentional point. Do you think he’s trying to provoke her by using that?”

WOLFSON: “I think it’s unfortunate. You know, Hillary Clinton is a two-term United States senator. She has represented this country abroad in dozens and dozens of countries. She’s been a — an advocate for families and children, one of the nation’s foremost advocates for families and children for 35 years. And so, you know, Mitt Romney wants to engage in a campaign of insults, that’s his choice. Americans want to hear issues and ideas and not these kind of insults.”

Pointing out Hillary Clinton, or any other presidential candidates lack of experience is not an insult. It goes directly to the heart of the issue. Certain lessons are best learned by the hard knocks of experience. Do we really want a president learning those lessons with the fate of the nation hanging in the balance? Hillary’s accomplishments are meager. Her resume for President of the United States is remarkably bare. Some would argue that it is blank. Even her most ardent supporters cannot offer up an instance where she has successfully implemented a policy or drafted a piece of legislation.

Instead, they rely on the image of her as a “battered woman;” a victim of male brutality and oppression. Whenever the slightest hint of criticism hits the airwaves, Clinton and her supporters are there to reassure us that her opponents would only do this because she is a woman, because they hated her husband, or because they just want to revel in the smut of her family’s dirty laundry.

As it turns out, there really aren’t too many succinct ways to describe a person who takes a job in order to gain work experience. These days, in the United States of America, the common term for such a person is an “intern.” It was this point that Romney was trying to illustrate when he used the word. The nasty pictures it conjured were all painted by the Clintons and their friends.