Hillary Clinton is planning to officially launch her US presidential campaign on Sunday while en route to Iowa, a source familiar with the campaign has confirmed to the Guardian.
The former secretary of state is scheduled to declare her second run for president on Twitter at noon eastern time on Sunday, the source told the Guardian, followed by a video and email announcement, then a series of conference calls mapping out a blitzkrieg tour beginning in Iowa and looking ahead to more early primary states.
Gone are the soaring speeches and large rallies. Instead, Clinton plans to appear with a handful of voters at less-scripted gatherings at coffee shops and in living rooms that will allow her to speak to individual voters, according to those knowledgeable about her plans but not authorized to speak publicly.
The strategy underscores the need for the former first lady, senator and secretary of state to relate to lower- and middle-class families after years of being criticized as an out-of-touch Washington insider garnering hefty paychecks for her speeches and tied to the nation’s biggest corporations.
Clinton has privately told her aides that she wants to avoid the coronation atmosphere of her 2008 launch and is trying to schedule what one person in her orbit described as “low-key” events where she will interact directly with voters — nearly seven years after her last appearances as a presidential candidate, when she lost to then-Senator Barack Obama.
Some supporters, though, are skeptical of a digital launch that may do little to soften Clinton’s edges. “I don’t know why she’s not doing an event with kids and families, that would have made more sense to me,” said a supporter with close ties to Clinton…
If Clinton’s 2008 campaign launch emphasized her electability – her kick-off slogan was “I’m in it to win it” – her 2016 is more about likability and her capacity to relate to real Americans after years of mansions, private jets and the damaging disclosure that she operated her own email server instead of using the State Department system as dictated by department rules.
After that, the nascent campaign will embark on a fundraising push that the Clinton camp says will dwarf anything seen in the history of presidential politics.
“They are going to raise in one week what some Republican presidential candidates are going to raise the entire cycle,” said one Clinton aide…
Ready for Hillary has raised close to $15 million from nearly 150,000 donors, and Clintonistas believe that those same donors alone could give as much as 10 times that amount to a Clinton campaign…
Regardless of when she announces, the plan, one Clinton insider told The Daily Beast, was to do a massive fundraising push through her website and with allied organizations to raise “an insane amount of money” right out of the starting gate.
If Hillary Clinton is to become her party’s 2016 presidential nominee, independents and even Democrats overwhelmingly want to see her earn the title, according to a Bloomberg Politics national poll that also shows increasing headwinds for her candidacy.
As Clinton prepared to formally announce her candidacy on Sunday, nearly three-quarters of Democrats and independents in the survey said it would be a good thing for the Democratic Party if she were to face a “serious” challenger for the nomination. Democrats and independents hold the same view, with 72 percent of both groups saying her party would be best served by a robust primary…
One thing is clear: The historic possibility of a woman becoming president isn’t a major influence on attitudes. The vast majority of poll respondents–83 percent–say they wouldn’t be more or less inclined to vote for Clinton because she would be the first female president.
Over dinner and drinks one night last week at Baratta’s, a cozy Italian restaurant in Des Moines, two top visiting Clinton strategists listened as supportive Iowa activists issued a stark warning: Some Democrats are far less enthused about her candidacy than others. After placing third in the Iowa caucuses in 2008, they said she must ask for every vote as well as being willing to run a gauntlet of small events and take part in grueling campaign sessions across the state…
One approach is to avoid blatant suggestions of the historic nature of her candidacy, hoping to fight impressions that Clinton’s presidential aspirations are all about her.
That was one of the key findings of research already conducted through focus groups in Iowa and New Hampshire. Those conversations, coupled with the searing lessons from 2008, have led aides to impress upon Clinton and her loyal circle of admirers that, far more than her own political ambitions, this race must be about what voters want.
Everything that I've read about the Clinton campaign rollout sounds like they've overthought everything
— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) April 11, 2015
The emphasis on small venues, refusing general election dollars–it all seems unnecessarily defensive and insecure
— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) April 11, 2015
Anyone who's been a coach or a competitor knows what it looks like–and how self-defeating it is–when someone is afraid of losing.
— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) April 11, 2015
For someone who has been on the national stage for a quarter-century, her beliefs are strangely hard to pin down. On foreign policy, she says she is neither a realist nor an idealist but an “idealistic realist”. In a recent memoir, she celebrates “the American model of free markets for free people”. Yet to a left-wing crowd, she says: “Don’t let anybody tell you, that, you know, it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.” (An aide later said she meant tax breaks for corporations.) Some candidates’ views can be inferred from the advisers they retain, but Mrs Clinton has hundreds, including luminaries from every Democratic faction. Charles Schumer, her former Senate colleague from New York, called her “the most opaque person you’ll ever meet in your life”.
Mrs Clinton’s critics on the right fret that she is a power-hungry statist. (“Give her an inch and she’ll be your ruler,” warns a campaign badge.) On the left they fear that she is close to Wall Street (her campaign is predicted to raise $1 billion), divorced from the lives of ordinary Americans (she first moved into a governor’s mansion in 1979) and hawkish (she backed the invasion of Iraq). Perhaps she is something in between: a sensible moderate? She fits this bill better than, say, Elizabeth Warren or Martin O’Malley, two possible Democratic rivals who bash trade and banking. But voters need to know more.
Mrs. Clinton and her team have decided that, on balance, the risk of lining up near Mr. Obama’s record is worth taking.
Rather than run from Mr. Obama, she intends to turn to him as one of her campaign’s most important allies and advocates — second only, perhaps, to her husband, the other president whose record will hover over her bid…
Mrs. Clinton does not plan to distance herself from Mr. Obama’s record, advisers said. Rather, she intends to praise, above all, the economic progress Mr. Obama has made, getting the country out of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and cutting the unemployment rate nearly in half.
Advisers say Mrs. Clinton will promise a “new chapter” that would expand upon Mr. Obama’s efforts to address persistently stagnant wages and rising inequality.
Forget “Two Americas”; conventional wisdom has settled on a “two Hillarys” theory of the 2008 campaign. Early on, there was Inevitable Hillary, a distant, aloof campaigner who took her nomination for granted and botched it. Later, there was Fighter Hillary, a surprisingly adept retail politician who showed genuine emotion and threw back boilermakers with union men. Besides, her campaign was riven by incredible backbiting, clashing egos, and bad behavior, as Joshua Green reported in The Atlantic.
Some of her early moves this time around have fed an impression that she’s back in the first mode… And does she really want this? That question is perhaps inextricable from what her campaign will be about, but Clinton has been headed toward a White House run for so long that one wonders whether she’s just doing it automatically. Those close to her who doubted a run questioned whether she still had the fire in her belly, but the declaration alone isn’t enough to answer the question.
Consider the last month, which has given the uninitiated a rare but crucial glimpse behind the curtain into ClintonWorld®. After delaying appearing publicly to address revelations that, as secretary of state, she had violated State Department regulations and federal law, and endangered national security, by routing her work e-mails through a private server, Clinton held the worst press conference since tennis star Rafael Nadal spent an entire post-match press appearance moaning. Her laughable excuse (“convenience”) was immediately debunked (by her own prior statements), and even softball questions left her visibly tetchy.
It was a timely reminder that Hillary Clinton the Person, the actual flesh-and-blood human being, is wildly unappealing. She is at best awkward and boring; she is at worst cold and petulant and endowed with all the public graces of a product of Disney’s animatronics lab. Of course she seems fake. You can’t spend years appealing to the mean of a Frank Luntz focus group and still cast yourself as Joan of Arc.
Onto a senator and secretary of state and slayer of the patriarchy — or onto a just-like-you jivamukti practitioner and goo-goo-ing grandma — the masses (so goes the Democratic logic) can project their hopes and dreams and aspirations. “Come to me all you who are weary of male egos and burdened by income inequality . . . ” They know that the key to campaign success is keeping Hillary Clinton an archetype and avatar.
As the Clinton campaign is about to begin, then, here’s a prediction: She, her team, and her party will obsess on cultural issues and attempt to divide the nation around them to a degree we have never quite seen before. She’ll do this both because she is a liberal woman and because she has very little to say on economic and foreign policy matters. Mrs. Clinton will go into this election believing the “culture wars” to be the best and safest political ground for her. She will portray Republicans as engaged in a “war on women” in such a way that past efforts will look like a walk in the park. The distortions, mob mentality, and smear campaign that characterized the reaction of the left to the Indiana version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (the federal version of which Bill Clinton signed into law) will be amplified by a factor of a hundred. If Hillary Clinton could talk about contraception, abortion, evolution, same sex marriage, and equal pay for equal work every day between now and November 2016, she would…
This certainly doesn’t mean the Republican nominee should become a social liberal. Nor does it mean the Republican standard-bearer can’t blunt these attacks or even reframe some of them in ways that might work to his advantage… But it will require a candidate who can defend moral truths, traditions, and basic rights (like religious liberty) in a way that is perceived by voters as principled and gracious rather than aggressive and judgmental. They need to be seen as promoting the human good and defending human dignity rather than as Old Testament prophets lamenting a lost way of life. Warning Americans that they are slouching toward Gomorrah won’t work and it shouldn’t be tried.
Pat Buchanan, the venerable Republican operative who advised Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, likes to assess politicians as “political athletes.” Putting aside ideologies, policy preferences, even personalities, how do they perform on the political playing field? “It’s charisma, charm, savvy,” he says. “Being a political athlete is having an extra dimension — it’s not learned; you’re born with it.” In Buchanan’s long career, the greatest political athletes he’s encountered have been John F. Kennedy, Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. “They’re naturals: Roy Hobbs or Mickey Mantle,” he says. Hillary, in Buchanan’s view, is the furthest thing from a natural: “She’s like Pete Rose, who has to grind out every hit.”
The grind can be obvious watching Clinton on the campaign trail. In her two successful Senate races and her unsuccessful presidential run in 2008, she often struggled to exhibit the basic qualities required of politicians. “Let’s remember who she’s beaten in her career: Rick Lazio and John Spencer,” says a Democratic consultant who has worked for and against Hillary. “The only time she’s run against anyone decent, she’s lost.” Where most pols project warmth, she often runs cold. Her speeches can be leaden and forced. She tightens up in unscripted moments…
“She’s a schemer and a planner and a plodder,” says the GOP consultant Rick Wilson, who worked for Rudy Giuliani during his aborted 2000 Senate campaign against Clinton. “You need people like that in politics, but most of the time they end up as campaign strategists, not candidates.” Buchanan is more blunt: “She reminds me of Nixon.”
As Hillary Clinton gets ready to announce Sunday — or rather as she gets ready to finally admit she’s been running for president more or less since the day after she conceded the 2008 nomination — we need to accept an important truth about presidential candidates. For all practical purposes, there’s simply no such thing as a strong general-election candidate…
Everything done by campaigns serves to build a superhumanly wonderful portrait of the candidate. There are those who are inclined to vote for that candidate anyway — partisans who always vote for their party, or swing voters reacting to the economy or other fundamentals. Those not inclined to do so probably won’t believe the hype, no matter how gushing. It may feel as if we’re drawn to vote for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney because we like them. In fact, we’re just very receptive to liking candidates who we are (more or less rationally) likely to support in the first place…
The harsh truth is that especially in a partisan age, the candidates themselves aren’t that big a factor in presidential general elections. Democrats may be wasting a lot of time and energy worrying what they would do if something happened to Clinton, but the truth is that they would do about as well with most replacements. And the odds are that the same will be true on the Republican side, too.
“Inevitability as a message is a bad message, especially when it becomes clear you’re not as inevitable as you thought you were,” says Democratic strategist Anita Dunn and former senior campaign advisor to President Obama. Clinton, however, “has learned that nothing in politics is inevitable.”
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