Hillary warns against inexperienced Obama

Following her defeat in Iowa to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton warned Democratic voters against raising false hopes by voting in favor of an inexperienced presidential candidate. Clinton disappointed her supporters' expectations by coming third, behind Obama and former North Carolina Senator John Edwards.

Clinton, an experienced politician, had been leading national opinion polls for months. She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2000, and spent eight years in the White House during her husband, Bill Clinton's presidential term from 1993 to 2001. In fact, she was often predicted to be the Democratic choice for president—the first woman president in the history of the United States. Obama, in contrast, was elected to the U.S. Senate only in 2004. Earlier, he served seven years in the Illinois State Senate.

With the New Hampshire primary coming up, Clinton is determined to fight it out. She said she would continue to point to Obama's youth and inexperience.

"This is a new day, this is a new state," she said, adding, "We can't have false hopes. We've got to have a person who can walk into that Oval office on day one and start doing the hard work that it takes to deliver change." Clinton also underplayed the Iowa results saying she had done well with voters over 45 but not so well with under 30s. "I was never a front-runner of any significance in Iowa. Iowa, I knew, was always going to be hard for me." She also said, ""I feel that we executed what we thought was the limit of what we could produce in Iowa under the circumstances that we were facing,"

Clinton also said Democrats needed a candidate who would withstand the 'Republican attack machine'. "I'm tested and I'm proven. I've been through the fires. Anyone that we nominate is going to be thrown into that blazing inferno ... the general election," she said.