“Everybody has an incentive to start this campaign – the staff, the consultants who are working for nothing and want to get paid, you guys in the media – everybody except Hillary Clinton,” the person added. “The goal here is to make this the shortest campaign possible. The emails thing didn’t change that.”
The danger, of course, is that the 20th Century political victors are ignoring 21st Century political reality and inviting the American body politic play by their idiosyncratic set of rules — as they did by deciding to use Bill Clinton’s private server as a conduit for Hillary Clinton’s government correspondence. Moreover, as the press conference proved, it’s put her in the familiar — and bizarre — position of entering the 2016 campaign as both the strongest non-incumbent ever to seek the office and a wounded, vulnerable frontrunner.
“She’ll get past these sort of little dust-ups, but we really have to start having a conversation,” says Iowa Democratic operative Tavis Hall, expressing the growing anxiousness of battleground Democrats eager for Clinton to hoist a flag to rally around.
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