Hillary Clinton 2016 might look a lot like Barack Obama 2012

Earlier this month, Jeremy Bird, the national field director for Obama’s re-election race, and Mitch Stewart, who ran the 10 swing state operation for the President, signed on to “Ready for Hillary” the super PAC that is functioning as a campaign-in-waiting for Clinton should she decide to run…

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The single most valuable commodity in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is the staff talent that Obama cultivated during his two presidential campaigns. While some of the top names — David Plouffe, David Axelrod, Dan Pfeiffer etc. — are Obama-ites through and through and won’t likely ever work on another presidential campaign, there is a whole layer of staff talent beneath them that is itching to bring what they learned in 2008 and/or 2012 to bear on another campaign. Bird and Stewart are at, or near, the top of that list — due in no small part to their expertise in building a field operation, a major weak spot of Clinton’s 2008 campaign.

Getting Bird and Stewart does not, of course, mean that the Obama campaign team — such as it is once some of the more senior people peel off to make megabucks in the private sector — will move en masse to Clinton if she runs in 2016. But, it does create at least the possibility that Clinton might have the lion’s share of those people in 2016 as opposed to them scattering to a variety of candidates in the race.

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