Tag: Hillary Clinton

Is Hillary Already Running?

Maggie Haberman reports on Clinton’s 2016 “shadow campaign”:

Publicly, Clinton insists she’s many months away from a decision about her political future. But a shadow campaign on her behalf has nevertheless been steadily building for the better part of a year — a quiet, intensifying, improvisational effort to lay the groundwork for another White House bid. … Several sources said in interviews that her team is discussing how she will weigh in on policy debates over the course of the next year. She is working closely with clusters of aides on different policy initiatives — one involves child development, and Clinton is also being advised to address income inequality. Her memoir about her time at the State Department, initially expected for June, is likely to be out later in the summer, putting a book tour closer to the time when she would campaign for candidates in the midterms. That’s also closer to when she’s likely to announce her plans, after the November election.

Morrissey yawns:

The first signs of primary campaigns will begin to pop up in about 12 months, if the pattern from the last two cycles holds. People who want to run for the presidency are expected to start doing some preliminary due diligence at this stage in the cycle, regardless. The best that Politico has on Hillary Clinton is that she took one consultant meeting a few months ago?

… Maggie Haberman does a good job of running down some of the insiders and outsiders that would form the campaign, if it launches, but there’s nothing in the piece that suggests that anything has changed at all since that one outside consultation last summer. It will make a useful touchstone for later when Hillary finally decides to enter the race or retire for good, but it gives no insight into where that decision is, nor any surprises on preparation for the campaign as a contingency.

Philip Bump isn’t surprised at the strategists clamoring to campaign for Hillary, given the money involved:

As The New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza put it, Clinton’s not having yet announced her own campaign left “every Dem consultant hustling for a buck.” That’s meant at least one conflict as those hustlers compete for space. In early 2013, Haberman reports, Clinton aide Huma Abedin (wife of Anthony Weiner) was asked to resolve a dispute between Ready For Hillary and Priorities USA. The former was soliciting money from donors the latter considered its domain. Clinton’s team resolved the dispute by creating a very campaign-like divide: Ready For Hillary would become the field staff, in essence, doing voter contact and data. Priorities USA would continue vacuuming up money from big donors. That split makes obvious why Clinton hasn’t had to announce any actual plans to run. Her decision to postpone any official announcement until later this year — Haberman figures it will come after midterms in November — makes perfect sense. Why go through the legal headache of formulating an official campaign infrastructure when there exist staffers and organizations that can raise money and reach out to voters and serve as an echo chamber without doing so? It gives the Clinton team semi-plausible deniability, distance from seeming as though it’s stepping on Obama’s second term.

Hillarycare’s Ghost Could Haunt Clinton

David Corn advises the Clintons to pray for Obamacare’s success:

Hillarycare ended up a political failure and set back the cause of health care reform for nearly two decades. It’s not an episode that Hillary Clinton would want discussed during a 2016 presidential campaign. If Obamacare thrives, there will be no reason to look back to Hillarycare and drag these charts out of the dustbin of history. But should the Affordable Care Act falter or collapse, a question will loom: What would Hillary do about health care? Her past record would be raked over and that would likely not boost her presidential prospects. Having screwed up in the early 1990s, could she argue that she would do a better job in reforming the health care system than Obama?

It would be best for a Clinton 2016 campaign for health care to be off the table—with no need to revisit all this inconvenient ancient history. That means she and Bill should be hoping that the implementation of Obamacare proceeds well—and they should do all they can to encourage that. So Bill Clinton ought to coordinate (closely) with the White House on what stuff he should be explaining. It’s not only the president’s political fortunes that are tied to Obamacare.

Hillary Isn’t Too Old To Run

by Patrick Appel

Nate Cohn reviews the actuarial tables:

A 65-year-old white woman has the same odds of dying the following year as a 60 year old white male. That puts her in roughly the same place as George H.W. Bush when he sought the presidency. She probably has a better chance than Ronald Reagan did. It would seem to give her much better odds than vice president Joe Biden, who’s a male and already older: eight percent of 69-year-old white males will die before the 2016 presidential election.

Christie has worse odds than Clinton

The New Jersey governor is just 50 years old, but studies show that obesity reduces life expectancy anywhere from six to ten years. According to the University of Pennsylvania life expectancy calculator, Christie’s life expectancy is 73 years, with a median of 74. That gives Christie the worst odds of any candidate: he has a 96.6 percent chance of living to the 2016 presidential election and only has an 84.2 percent chance of surviving until January 2025, when he might be concluding his second term in the White House. In comparison, Hillary Clinton gets a 93.8 percent chance—which lines up nicely with the 92 percent of white female senators, cabinet secretaries, and first ladies who have survived to age 78.

Hands Off Hillary’s Campaign

ISRAEL-US-PERES-CLINTON

Margaret Carlson asks Bubba to stay the hell out of the race next time:

Bill Clinton is now beloved — achieving a comeback no one thought possible. If he meddles in his wife’s 2016 campaign the way he did in 2008, he could lose his hard-won halo. If she lets him meddle, she will go down with him.

He will always loom. What didn’t drive them apart made their marriage stronger. But one thing he hasn’t learned is how to stand by his woman without standing in her way, blocking our view.

So thank you, Bill, for all you’ve done. Now for all womankind, and for the sake of the TBD at the end of Hillary’s Twitter profile, could you go where no man has gone before, except perhaps Denis Thatcher, and take one step back and to the side?

She can’t do this with you.

That’s great advice. Hillary finally broke through as her own candidate and politician – when she ran for Senate. The fact she got the seat because she was First Lady was the only blemish, but her campaign for the presidency truly broke her out of the politics-through-marriage paradigm. Now it seems that Bill is already prepping for her candidacy, by joining with McCain against Obama on Syria. But Bill is not, it seems to me, a good judge of the future. I don’t think a future Democratic candidate will come from the interventionist, pro-military right. I think it will come from the non-interventionist left. Could Hillary manage that? I think she’s far too Establishment. And stuck in the mindset of the 1990s.

(Photo by David Buimovitch/AFP/Getty)

Hillary: Stronger Than Ever

Nate Cohn notes that Hillary Clinton currently “commands a staggering 60 percent of the primary vote, an unprecedented figure for a non–vice presidential candidate and one of the highest levels of support of all time”:

Yes, Clinton lost in 2008. But it’s important to note how much stronger her numbers are today than they were in 2007. Back then, only 35-40 percent of Democratic voters offered their support. With a few additional gains, Clinton was able to expand to nearly 50 percent of the vote, despite getting only a sliver of the African American vote. Polls indicate that Clinton has won back much of their support, giving her the broad coalition she possess today.

The true Clinton skill is survival. How those two ever got through the primaries in 1992 still amazes me. Lying very well helped. But it’s clear to me that Clinton has changed, as we all have over the years. There was, for me anyway, a real issue with her path to power – through her husband. But once she had won a Senate seat, and then exhibited remarkable magnanimity at the 2008 Convention, and gained real government experience as secretary of state, she became her own politician. My reservations on that score have evaporated.

Still: did she really make a big impact as secretary of state? Foreign policy was guarded by the president by and large. Maybe some pro-Clinton readers can make the case and persuade me I’m wrong to downplay her substantive record.

Why Not Hillary?

by Patrick Appel

Frum claims that Hillary winning the 2016 nomination will be bad for the Democratic party:

After eight years in the White House, a party requires a self-appraisal and a debate over its way forward. Bill Clinton offered Democrats just such a debate in 1992 with his “New Democrat” ideas. Barack Obama offered another in 2008 with his careful but unmistakable criticism of Clinton-era domestic policies and Hillary Clinton’s Iraq war vote. But if Hillary Clinton glides into the nomination in 2016 on the strength of money, name recognition, and a generalized feeling of “It’s her turn,” then Democrats will forgo this necessary renewal.

Kilgore pushes back:

I’m all for fresh talent and helpful intra-party debates, but I’d say what Democrats probably want and need most is a 2016 victory to consolidate the policy achievements of the Obama administration while perhaps convincing Republicans the vicious obstructionism they’ve been exhibiting since 2009 is a dead end.

Agreed. The Democrats have their differences but the party is more ideologically unified now than it has been in decades and the Democratic coalition is basically sound.