H4a news Clips [April 11, 2015] Summary of Today’s news


National Coverage – HRC AND DEMS



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National Coverage – HRC AND DEMS
National Stories

Hillary Clinton to announce 2016 bid Sunday with video [Brianna Keilar & Jeff Zeleny, CNN, April 10, 2015]


Hillary Clinton will launch her presidential campaign Sunday with a video on social media announcing her candidacy, followed immediately by campaign travel to build on the announcement, according to a source close to Clinton's campaign in waiting.
Hillary Clinton will launch her presidential campaign Sunday with a video on social media announcing her candidacy, followed immediately by travel to build on the announcement, according to a source close to Clinton's campaign in waiting.
Her first stop will likely be to the early caucus state of Iowa, according to the source.
Observers see the likely visit to Iowa as a show of humility by Clinton, who came in third in the 2008 caucuses and who, so far, has dominated the likely Democratic field for 2016.
Clinton has already filmed her campaign video, a person close to the campaign said, which outlines the central themes of her second bid for the White House. The message is intended to send a signal to Democrats that she intends to aggressively fight for the party's presidential nomination.
The decision will sweep aside more than a year of speculation about her political aspirations and allow her to start making her case to voters. Advisers say she knows that Democratic activists are not interested in a coronation and she intends to campaign as though she has a tough primary challenge.
Central to Clinton's second presidential run will be reintroducing the former first lady -- on her own terms -- to the American people. Democrats close to Clinton have started to call her the most unknown famous person in the world. Their argument is that people know of Clinton -- she has near 100% name recognition in most polls -- but they don't know her story.
Clinton is expected to trade big rallies for a series of smaller events with voters, as she seeks to reintroduce herself to voters. Her supporters have urged Clinton to take the time to meet voters one-on-one and build their trust.
"The views about women candidates and how they should conduct themselves has really changed since 2008," said Bonnie Campbell, the co-chair of Clinton's 2008 campaign in Iowa. "First and foremost people vote for candidates that they like, people who connect with them emotionally. I think that helps with everybody but certainly it helps with women and the men who love them. It just makes her a more complete person."
Clinton's presidential campaign has long been a foregone conclusion, and speculation that she would take another shot at the White House has followed the former first lady since she left the State Department in early 2013.
For much of the last two years, Clinton has crisscrossed the country delivering paid speeches, selling her new memoir and stumping for Democrats during the 2014 midterm elections.
In the coming weeks and months, the Clinton campaign will look to hone in on that story, using themes such as Clinton's Midwestern upbringing, her mother's perseverance in the face of neglectful parents and Clinton's own time raising a daughter to cast the presidential hopeful in a more favorable, softer light than she was seen during her 2008 presidential run.
Campbell said she saw voters in Iowa light up when they connected with Clinton in coffee shops and in their homes, but those events were few and far between compared to large rallies and speeches. She said Clinton's empathetic side was not seen nearly enough during her 2008 campaign.
"Somehow, that did not come through in Iowa," Campbell said.
But her efforts to introduce herself come as Clinton is fighting fresh questions about her trust and honesty. The controversy about using a private email server while Secretary of State has already caused some political damage, her aides concede, which is one of the reasons she is jumping into the race to start campaigning on her own terms.
March found Clinton at the center of her own controversy over her exclusive use of private -- rather than official -- email during her time running the State Department. The controversy, again seized on by Republican critics, escalated, and Clinton took to a quickly organized press conference at the United Nations to respond to controversy.
Hillary Clinton skeptics fear 'an unstoppable train' [Gabriel DeBendetti, POLITICIO, April 10, 2015]
Concerns mount that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign will be no different than her ’08 campaign.

It’s gotten to this point: Even the Democratic Party’s Hillary skeptics are resigned to her being the party’s nominee.

“I don’t see a path for anyone not named Clinton,” declared former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who served as United Nations ambassador under Bill Clinton before running against Hillary in 2008.

“You know I don’t get along with her,” he noted, by way of explanation. “I’m not a Ready for Hillary person. I’m trying to be honest with you.”


Added Bob Shrum, the veteran liberal strategist whose list of presidential candidates (Al Gore, John Kerry) does not include anyone named Clinton: “Assuming she remains healthy and runs the kind of campaign she will run, I don’t see anyone beating her.”
Their conclusions are based on a range of factors, from Clinton’s standing in the polls to her formidable fundraising potential. But there’s another one: None of her potential challengers appear to have the will and/or the ability to beat her.
Still, as Clinton prepares to announce her campaign on Sunday, there’s a pervasive feeling among unaligned Democrats and Clinton loyalists alike that at least one of the possible challengers will take the plunge and creep up to 20 or 25 percent in the polls — enough to give her a scare. It’s still a waiting game, though, because there’s no such consensus on a few critical questions.
Namely: who, when and how.
Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, former Virginia senator Jim Webb, and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders — the trio who have shown the greatest interest in mounting a challenge to Clinton — face a steep path, Democratic operatives say, while the two most famous names mentioned as potential challengers — Vice President Joe Biden and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren — seem increasingly far from running.
Lincoln Chafee, the former Rhode Island senator and governor, emerged in the last few days to stake a possible claim to be the Clinton alternative, raising Warren-like concerns about Clinton’s closeness to Wall Street. But he’s a maverick whose shift from Republican to independent to Democrat is unlikely to excite the progressive base.
Nonetheless, the array of party operatives, Clinton allies, and former Democratic presidential candidates who spoke with POLITICO described a path for any of the would-be challengers similar to the ones O’Malley and Chafee are trying to blaze: Distinguish themselves from Clinton on a series of policy points, mostly by running to her left — and then, simply due to the structure of the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucus, one of them would likely approach a 30 percent showing. But nearly every figure also cautioned that, given Clinton’s lead in polls and in organizing throughout the country, the path forward for any other candidate would be treacherous.
Nonetheless, the situation on the ground does not mirror 2007, when Clinton was overtaken by a rush of support and money that flowed to the upstart Barack Obama. By mid-April 2007, both Clinton and Barack Obama were both polling in the 20-to-40 percent range nationally.
“It would take a formidable, inspirational candidate” to seriously challenge Clinton now, says Richardson, who himself was at around 3 percent in April 2007, and who added that O’Malley has emailed him to talk about foreign policy. “I think while O’Malley is developing as a good candidate, I don’t see the mix for a dramatic alternative there.”
That’s largely because Richardson’s 3 percent in 2007 is roughly three times higher than O’Malley’s 1 percent in the RealClearPolitics national polling average through March of this year. That leaves him alongside Webb’s 1 percent and behind Sanders’s 4 percent. Clinton’s 60 is trailed by Biden’s and Warren’s 12 percent, despite the former’s lack of political organization and the latter’s repeated insistence that she will not run. The numbers are similar in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states to vote in the primary contest.
Nonetheless, Clinton aides point to O’Malley as the most viable alternative candidate, believing he will eventually pick up support from many of the liberal activists currently urging Warren to run. The silver lining in his low name recognition is that he has an opportunity to introduce himself to the American people on his own terms.
Warren, meanwhile, repeatedly insists she will not throw her hat in the ring despite an organized campaign put together by progressive groups intended to draft the bank antagonist.
And even though the vice president has run for president twice before — including against Clinton and Obama in 2008 — he has no political operation to speak of. Biden’s supporters insist that he would need little preparation to jump in due to his existing networks and the goodwill generated by his trips to Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina earlier this year. But he shows no signs of seriously considering a run.
The biggest opportunity for a Clinton alternative would likely come in Iowa, the site of her 2008 undoing, because the caucus system there is friendly enough to protest candidates that someone else, or a group of others, will almost certainly garner at least one-quarter of the vote. Even Iowa’s sitting senator, Tom Harkin, won just 76 percent when he ran in 1992, despite the fact that none of his rival candidates, including Bill Clinton, bothered to contest the caucuses.
But even a relatively promising showing in Iowa could be a one-off if it doesn’t generate momentum for a challenger heading into New Hampshire. And, for Clinton, “it’s kind of a luxury in a campaign when you’re worried about only getting 75 percent of the vote,” notes Shrum.
One person who disagrees with the idea that challenging Clinton is a hopeless task is former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, who vaulted from single digits in the polls to mount a serious challenge against the far better-known and better-funded Walter Mondale in 1984.
“I also discount the polls a great deal,” says Hart, who is personally close with O’Malley and a past email correspondent with Webb. “At this moment, and for a time period, they are name recognition functions and less matters of preference.”
O’Malley, for one, has been trying to boost his name recognition as he preps for a likely run.
He and Webb are expected to appear at South Carolina’s Clyburn Fish Fry on April 24 — an annual event hosted by Rep. Jim Clyburn that frequently draws presidential hopefuls to the early voting state — and the state party’s convention the next day. Clinton is not currently scheduled to appear, but may do so after formally announcing her candidacy.
It’s a reflection of a long-established pattern: O’Malley has been by far the most aggressive candidate in terms of early state organizing, while Webb has been slow to schedule events and Clinton has let others represent her. Sanders, meanwhile, has appeared in early states but also spent considerable time elsewhere — most recently a political trip with stops in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Austin, and Chicago. The groups supporting a Warren candidacy have also been organizing voters in the early states, but absent a candidate, they have largely focused on shifting the overall conversation to the left.
The four likeliest contenders — O’Malley, Webb, Sanders, and Chafee — occupy vastly different lanes within the party, in terms of ideology, experience, and preparation for 2016.
O’Malley saw his 2016 chances flicker when his expected successor lost his 2014 run for governor, in what was seen by some as a referendum on the outgoing governor. He says he will decide whether to run for president sometime this spring. But he has already pulled together a team of operatives that includes Bill Hyers, the campaign manager for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
This year, he has already stopped by at least four events in each of Iowa and New Hampshire, and one in South Carolina. He also recently hired a new press secretary with New Hampshire experience.
Meanwhile Webb, a one-term senator and former Secretary of the Navy under Republican President Ronald Reagan, has been more deliberate. After announcing his exploratory committee in November, Webb has largely kept out of the public eye. But he recently traveled to Iowa and has hired a state campaign director.
Sanders, a self-described socialist who often rails against billionaires and appears frequently on television, initially suggested he would decide whether to run in March. But he told POLITICO that month that he would likely push off a decision because of his work as the ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee. His spokesman now says he will make a decision “sooner rather than later.”
Chafee has been the most eager to take on Clinton, though his bid would be regarded as an even longer shot after he declined to seek re-election for governor in 2014 when it became clear he would face a tough Democratic primary.
Indeed, none of these candidates will have the benefit of anything approaching the widespread Clinton network, which was largely represented by the independent political action committee Ready For Hillary that signed up nearly 4 million voters over the last two-plus years.
In the face of such organizing, the non-Clinton candidates seemed so daunted that none of them seized the moment in March when Clinton was revealed to have used a private email system as secretary of state.
Former candidates and advisers say the best approach would be to chip away at Clinton on a few policies — like Wall Street regulation — as a way to start to gain traction.
“If the policies [Clinton] comes out with are all-inclusive, then a primary is not necessary,” said Reverend Al Sharpton, who ran in 2004. But “if they’re just running and there’s no policy debate, it’s just a vanity exercise.”
O’Malley has said the presidency should not be “passed between two families” — a reference to the Clintons and the Bushes — and has begun tailoring his rhetoric on Wall Street policy to Clinton’s left, though he has not attacked her by name.
Webb is taking a different tack, suggesting he is, in the words Rania Batrice, his Iowa state director, an outsider who is well-positioned to take on the Democratic Party’s most famous name.
“It’s safe to say that Iowans and the rest of the country are tired of the ‘same ol’, same ol” rhetoric when it comes to today’s political atmosphere,” she wrote. “They’re ready for someone different, someone who will put people ahead of politics. That is Jim Webb.”
But neither Webb nor Sanders can realistically claim that they are fresh faces. At 69 and 73, respectively, each is older than the 67-year-old Clinton. And while O’Malley is largely a new face on the national scene, Clinton’s team can point to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll showing that over 60 percent of Democrats favor “experience” to “a new direction” in a presidential candidate.
“A lot of this [talk of alternatives] is that journalism abhors a presidential primary vacuum, so a lot of it is hothouse stories. They’re not real stories,” said Shrum. “If you ask me, in all honesty, do I see a path? No.”
Or, in the words of Richardson: “It’s very likely going to be an unstoppable train.”
Clinton studying up on upward mobility with Harvard economist [Annie Linsky, The Boston Globe, April 10, 2015]

Hillary Clinton has been consulting with Harvard professor Raj Chetty as she formulates her economic policy.

Harvard professor Raj Chetty flew from Boston to New York City about two months ago to give a private tutorial on his research into social mobility. The student: Hillary Clinton.

In a conference room at her Manhattan personal office, he clicked through a set of slides including a map of the United States that shows how poor children are more likely to get ahead in some parts of the country than in others. The meeting, which included members of Clinton’s staff, lasted two hours.

Clinton absorbed the lesson well.

At a panel discussion at the Center for American Progress in Washington last month, she cited Chetty by name and echoed his work: “Why do some communities, frankly, have more ladders for opportunity than others?” Clinton asked.

With Hillary Clinton expected to launch her presidential campaign on Sunday, Democratic donors and strategists agree that her message will have to address the yawning gap between the rich and lower classes in America. How she will navigate this issue, and what the broader theme of her campaign will be, has been one of the pressing questions of her precampaign period.

Chetty’s emphasis on upward mobility offers a less divisive way to address middle class economic issues than the rhetoric of income inequality that progressives in the Democratic Party like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and her followers are pushing. It’s also more palatable to large corporations and wealthy donors who have funded her previous campaigns.

The other key topic Clinton is expected to quickly embrace — women’s issues — appears to be less fraught.

Clinton “leaned in” on that topic at an Emily’s List gala in Washington, according to one of staff member at the organization. She delighted the room when ticked off a list issues the group cares about: Access to paid sick days, paid medical and family leave, affordable child care and more flexible work schedules.

“It’s an outrage that so many women are still paid less than men for the same work,” Clinton said. “These aren’t just problems for women. They’re problems for families and for our entire economy.”

Clinton’s expected to make her first trip to Iowa next week. Emily’s List activists are hoping that the trip — which will be heavily covered by the national media — will coincide with Equal Pay Day on Tuesday, and bring more attention to the gap in salaries between men and women.

And many are noting that Clinton is already embracing the historic nature of her White House bid more than she did in 2008. She’s taken series shots at Senate Republicans for stalling the nomination of Loretta Lynch for attorney general via her Twitter feed. And she used Twitter for a playful back-and-forth with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, where both women touted their Wellesley College educations.

Albright wrote: “Statistics show that @Wellesley alums make great Secretaries — right?”

Clinton replied: “There must be something in the water @Wellesley. #YouGoGirl”

Over the past few weeks Clinton has hired staff for her campaign and found office space in Brooklyn for campaign headquarters. A Clinton spokesman, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, Clinton’s precampaign has been winding down: The Ready for Hillary super-PAC, formed to convince the former First Lady to run, spent the week hosting a fire sale on merchandise with prices dropping each day. On Sunday all items were 40 percent off. On Tuesday glassware was 50 percent off. On Wednesday fleece products were 60 percent off. On Friday all T-shirts were on sale for $10.

The same activists buying up the “merch’’ are also ready to hear her start making her case. And polls show that Americans continue to see the economy as the most important issue facing the country.

The research Chetty and his team have done shows that children who grow up in parts of the country with less segregation, less income inequality, stronger schools, more social capital, and stable families are more likely to improve their social standing as adults. He and his colleagues are preparing to release policy prescriptions in coming months.

Clinton was “really interested in issues of social mobility and the American dream” during their meeting Chetty said. “She really engaged with the data,” Chetty recalled.

He also spoke at last year’s Clinton Global Initiative meeting, where he mentioned his signature eye-popping statistic: “Chances of achieving the ‘American Dream’ are almost two times higher in Canada than the United States,” he said, showing slide with data to back up the claim.

Other researchers on his project said that people from different political backgrounds tend to seize on different parts of the work. “When you look at the data it is a political Rorschach test,” said Nathaniel Hendren, an assistant professor at Harvard.

Indeed, on Monday Chetty said he plans to talk with Republican Jeb Bush, who is also mulling a White House run. He’s also sat down with Warren in her Cambridge home and spoken with President Obama.

Thinkers in the left wing of the party are skeptical of what Chetty’s findings will mean when injected into a presidential campaign.

“Social mobility is a good thing, but it is not the right question,” said Damon Silvers, the Director of Policy and Special Counsel for the AFL-CIO. “The right question is what happens to the majority of us who work hard and don’t make it to the top of the pyramid?”

Clinton has sent some soothing signals to the progressive wing of the party. She has consulted with Joseph Stiglitz in recent months, a Nobel prize winning economist who recently wrote a book entitled “The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future.”

During the Aspen Ideas Festival last year, Clinton was asked about income inequality and seemed to fuse the ideas from thinkers on both wings of the party. Her answer of noted the importance of bolstering the middle class with the notion of helping children move up the social ladder.


“We’ve always been very proud of the fact that we have an upwardly mobile expanding middle class society,” Clinton said. “We’ve had this American Dream embedded in our DNA.”
Hillary Clinton begins her entry into the 2016 presidential race [Anne Gearan & Philip Rucker, WaPo, April 10, 2015]
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s long-anticipated entry into the 2016 presidential race took shape Friday, with Democrats saying she will announce her candidacy on Sunday and begin a series of deliberately small discussions with voters next week.
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s long-anticipated entry into the 2016 presidential race took shape Friday, with Democrats saying she will announce her candidacy on Sunday and begin a series of deliberately small discussions with voters next week.
The low-key rollout — no big rallies or lengthy speeches — will end months of speculation surrounding the overwhelming favorite for the Democratic nomination. Clinton intends to begin her second White House bid via social media, probably Twitter, and include a video that introduces her economic-centered campaign message before jetting to Iowa next week for public appearances, according to three Democrats with knowledge of her plans.
Behind the scenes, meanwhile, Clinton’s fundraising machine is coming to life. Her top bundlers are plotting aggressive outreach to thousands of Democratic donors over the weekend and into next week to urge them to send checks and make donations online as soon as the Clinton campaign’s Web site goes live.
The strategists and allies spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details of the forthcoming announcement. Spokesmen for Clinton’s now-robust campaign-in-waiting declined to comment Friday.
Clinton’s go-slow, go-small start is the opposite of how many Republicans have entered or plan to enter the race. Instead of a splashy launch event, Clinton’s plan is a calculated understatement. She is scheduling a series of small roundtables and other give-and-take sessions with voters, first in Iowa and later in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — the states holding the first presidential primaries and caucuses early next year.
The idea is to showcase Clinton’s abilities as a problem-solver and crusader for the rights of those struggling to climb into or stay in the middle class. The intimate events with voters are also designed to help the former secretary of state connect with ordinary Americans and listen to their concerns, supporters said.
Jay Jacobs, a former New York Democratic Party chairman and longtime Clinton friend, said he thinks the events will present Clinton “as she is known by people who are close to her: as a very warm, genuine, thoughtful, certainly intelligent, regular person.”
“There’s been so much that we’ve seen that seems to create an image, by the press and by others, those who are looking to derail her, but now the voters are going to hear from Hillary,” Jacobs said.
Clinton’s human-scale approach is modeled on the listening tour she conducted across New York state at the start of her successful 2000 Senate race. She came to that campaign as a sitting first lady and political celebrity with no roots in New York, but her efforts to seek out New Yorkers’ opinions — in diners as well as people’s living rooms and kitchens — surprised many voters and some critics.
“It became a two-way conversation that impressed voters not by just what she said, but by how intently she listened,” Jacobs said. “I think that’s Hillary. That’s something that has worked before and it’ll work again.”
David Axelrod, who helped lead the insurgent 2008 Barack Obama campaign that eclipsed Hillary Clinton’s first presidential run, welcomed the new approach.
For 30 years, Hillary Clinton has been a fixture on the national stage. Now, as she takes another shot at becoming the first female president, she's hoping to battle any Clinton fatigue by touting her unique experience. (AP)
“Humility is the order of the day,” Axelrod said. “Last time, they launched as a big juggernaut cloaked in the veil of inevitability and at 20,000 feet. There was a tremendous backlash to that. It is imperative for her to go out, to meet people where they live, to make her case, to deliver a message, to listen to what they have to say and to ask for their votes.”
Axelrod added that Clinton must also articulate a message about economic mobility during her launch that’s “compelling and authentic,” rooted in her personal biography. “She needs to project what the cause is that she’s fighting for here and give people a sense of where they fit into that vision,” he said.
One open question for Clinton allies is what role her husband, former president Bill Clinton, and their daughter, Chelsea, will play in the campaign. Both have made splashy media appearances in the past week, with Chelsea on the cover of Elle and Bill on the cover of Town & Country. The former president told the magazine that he plans to be merely a “backstage adviser” to his wife, at least in the early stages of the campaign.
Widely considered by Democrats to be Obama’s heir apparent, Clinton has hired several of the president’s top campaign strategists to work on her 2016 bid.
In polls, Clinton is the dominant Democratic candidate, and in general election matchups she is at least slightly ahead of all likely Republican challengers.
The potential to become America’s first female president is a lodestar for Clinton’s campaign, and the soon-to-be candidate has strongly suggested that she will stress her path-breaking role.
Clinton resisted pressure from some Democrats to begin her campaign earlier this year, using the past several months to hone her message and assemble an extensive operation to run a campaign and raise money. She has recruited dozens of staffers who have been volunteering their time before the launch; her team signed a lease last week on office space in Brooklyn to serve as her national campaign headquarters.
Clinton’s Sunday announcement would come one day before the expected campaign launch of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), who is planning a major speech to supporters Monday afternoon at Miami’s Freedom Tower. On Friday, Rubio released a YouTube video, called “A New American Century,” previewing his announcement.
With Clinton’s launch, Republicans are revving up their attack machine. The Republican National Committee announced an online ad Friday to highlight past scandals, including her use of private e-mail at the State Department.
“From the East Wing to the State Department, Hillary Clinton has left a trail of secrecy, scandal and failed liberal policies that no image consultant can erase,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement. “Voters want to elect someone they can trust and Hillary’s record proves that she cannot be trusted. We must ‘Stop Hillary.’ ”
Like the small-scale rollout in Iowa living rooms, Clinton and her advisers are also modulating their fundraising early on to avoid appearing presumptuous and keep the campaign focused on a grass-roots effort. Clinton allies have been tamping down expectations for a massive influx of campaign cash, but her fundraisers anticipate a rush of major donors trying to get checks in the door on Day One.
“All the horses are in the gate just waiting for those gates to open,” said John Morgan, a Clinton fundraiser in Florida. “There’s really nothing to do until the gate opens. But the gate could open Sunday and it could be the flood gate. The only issue they’ll have is how fast can they raise the money, because the money is pent up.”
Clinton will raise only primary-season money at first, with a cap of $2,700 a donor. That is partly to avoid the appearance that Clinton is taking the nomination for granted. The focus on Internet appeals will free up Clinton to spend time on the trail talking to voters, rather than wooing wealthy donors at glitzy, high-priced fundraisers.
“I don’t think the first thing out of the gate she should be doing is a bunch of big fundraising events,” said one senior party strategist who requested anonymity to speak candidly.
The approach is a notable contrast to former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who has spent the better part of four months crisscrossing the country holding closed-door finance events for his Right to Rise political action committee and super PAC with tickets costing as much as $100,000 each.
“I think she’ll be in Iowa eating corn on the cob instead of clinking champagne flutes with donors,” Morgan said. “She can do this much quicker, much more efficiently because she’s not fighting for donors. Rubio, Bush, that whole crowd is in mortal combat for dollars. She’s not. That’s her advantage.”
The campaign is not expected to give titles to top bundlers or announce a list of finance committee chairs or members at the outset, according to Democrats with knowledge of the Clinton strategy.
One priority is creating an extensive small-donor network similar to the Obama campaign’s much-admired list from his 2008 and 2012 campaigns, and Clinton advisers see her announcement period as a ripe opportunity.
“We’re not going to take it slow,” said one Clinton fundraiser who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the campaign’s internal plans. “The announcement is a good time to raise money, and we’ll have everyone out there asking people to support her candidacy.”
The campaign will be able to build on the efforts of Ready for Hillary, an outside group started in 2013 to lay the groundwork for Clinton’s run that has held more than 1,000 grass-roots events in all 50 states. The group amassed a donor pool of more than 135,000 people, the vast majority of whom gave contributions of $100 or less, according to PAC officials.
Ready for Hillary will not be able to coordinate with Clinton once she announces, but it could share its list of supporters with her campaign through a list swap, campaign finance lawyers said.
The group may not even have to take that step, however. Once Clinton declares her candidacy, the super PAC can simply direct its supporters to her Web site, allowing her campaign to quickly build a small donor list.
Once she’s officially in, Ready for Hillary plans to post online the names of hundreds of donors who have given or raised more than $5,000, according to a person familiar with the plans. That list — which includes at least 222 donors who gave $25,000 — would be valuable not just for Clinton’s campaign but for Priorities USA, the high-dollar super PAC planning to finance a pro-Clinton television advertising campaign and facing pressure to kick-start its fundraising.
Ahead of the campaign launch, Clinton released a new epilogue Friday for “Hard Choices,” her State Department memoir coming out this month in paperback. In it, she ruminates about a “memory quilt” she received as a gift after her granddaughter Charlotte’s birth last September.
“I wondered for a moment what a quilt of my own life would look like,” Clinton wrote. “There was so much more to do. So many more panels waiting to be filled in. I folded up the quilt and got back to work.”
Matea Gold and Dan Balz contributed to this report.
Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Campaign to Make a Low-Key Start [Peter Nicholas & Laura Meckler, WSJ, April 10, 2015]
Hillary Clinton will launch her second campaign for the White House on Sunday with much less fanfare than the standard 2016 rollout: She’ll post a video online, followed by small events with voters spaced out slowly over coming weeks.
Hillary Clinton will launch her second campaign for the White House on Sunday with much less fanfare than the standard 2016 rollout: She’ll post a video online, followed by small events with voters spaced out slowly over coming weeks.
The strategy stands in contrast to Republican contenders, who have kicked off their campaigns with splashy events and cheering crowds. The lower-key approach also differs from Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential effort, when she often traveled with a large staff and Secret Service entourage that kept her at a distance from voters.
Mrs. Clinton, given her long presence on the national stage and current lack of serious competition, finds herself in the odd position of appearing like an incumbent, which brings both benefits and drawbacks. While she doesn’t need to prove she can draw a crowd, Mrs. Clinton needs to show herself working hard for the nomination, her advisers say, to avoid giving the impression it is hers for the taking.
Central to the task is laying out the rationale for her campaign, which some supporters say has been absent amid Mrs. Clinton’s two-year pondering about a run.
“I think No. 1 is to articulate what she’d like to do if she were president and where she wants to take the country,” said Jeff Link, a Democratic consultant in Des Moines, Iowa. “We haven’t heard that.”
The answer her campaign is set to offer: Mrs. Clinton is a fighter for the middle class and a results-driven pragmatist who can make Washington work again.
In the days following her announcement, Mrs. Clinton will likely hold a handful of events followed by short bursts of travel through April. Behind the scenes, her campaign team will settle into its new headquarters in New York City, and a significant fundraising operation will gear up to begin raising more than $1 billion.
She will be accompanied by fewer aides than in 2008, in hopes of seeming more disarming and approachable, her team says.
“She needs to be a good retail politician, and go around the state and engage in meetings with voters that maybe 20 to 40 people,” said Tom Henderson, chairman of the Polk County Democratic Party, in Iowa’s largest county. “That’s where all the activists come. Once you start to get the activists on your side, then they will reach out to their neighbors.”
Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, made a similar point in an interview with Town & Country magazine.
“I think it’s important, and Hillary does too, that she go out there as if she’s never run for anything before and establish her connection with the voters,” Mr. Clinton said.
Mrs. Clinton towers over her potential rivals in polling in a way that has little precedent in recent presidential elections. On Friday, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who is considering running against her for the nomination, suggested that her dominance may be overstated.
“There is an inevitable front-runner who remains inevitable right up until he or she is no longer inevitable,” he told MSNBC.
Mrs. Clinton will make her formal launch already under fire from both the political right and left.
Republicans, presuming she is the likely general-election nominee, are attacking her on a daily basis for her decision to use a personal email account for public business as secretary of state and her family foundation’s acceptance of donations from foreign countries.
“Voters want to elect someone they can trust and Hillary’s record proves that she cannot be trusted,” Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said in a statement Friday.
The RNC released an online ad with voices raising questions about her record, as a woman meant to be Mrs. Clinton walks away from the camera toward a stage. It ends with the message: “Stop Hillary.”
The RNC said it was spending more than $100,000 in online advertising including promoting the Web ad.
Some liberal Democrats worry that she isn’t populist enough in her policy outlook, especially when it comes to the economy and Wall Street, and is too willing to make compromises. Some have launched a movement to draft Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) into the race, despite her repeated statements that she won’t run.
Advisers say Mrs. Clinton’s core argument will be her support for the middle class and that she is a pragmatist who can make Washington work again. It is a case she has made in roundabout fashion in paid speeches, interviews and other appearances. In coming weeks, she will make it in town-hall meetings, diners and living rooms in states that hold early nomination contests, including Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.
During her 2008 run, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign saw her chief challenge as projecting strength, so voters would feel comfortable electing a woman as commander-in-chief at a time when the U.S. was engaged in two wars. Now, after four years as secretary of state, she has those credentials, advisers say, and the goal is to show a softer side.
In a new epilogue being published with the paperback release of her most recent book, “Hard Choices,” Mrs. Clinton writes of the joys of becoming a grandmother. She segues from her personal experience to her policy agenda—something advisers say she will do frequently.
“You shouldn’t have to be the granddaughter of a President or a Secretary of State to receive excellent health care, education, enrichment, and all the support and advantages that will one day lead to a good job and a successful life,” she wrote in an excerpt published in the Huffington Post.
Mrs. Clinton is expected to frame the economic debate around the idea of “responsible capitalism,” said one adviser. “You can support business, but business needs to be responsible in how they make money and what they need to give back to society,” is how the adviser put it.
She will also draw distinctions with Mr. Obama, emphasizing how she would give high priority to forging close ties to Capitol Hill, something many say Mr. Obama failed to do. In one speech last year, she seemed to offer a veiled criticism of the president.
“I mean, some people can paint a beautiful vision,” she said at a CNN event. “And, thankfully, we can all learn from that. But then, can you, with the tenacity, the persistence, the getting-knocked down, getting-back-up resilience, can you lead us there?
Can Hillary Clinton run an intimate campaign? [Alex Seitz-Wald, MSNBC, April 10, 2015]
Alex Seitz-Wald explores how Hillary Clinton can run a campaign that maximizes intimate contact with voters.
After a long wait, Hillary Clinton will finally makes her second presidential bid official Sunday with a social media “soft launch,” followed by a trip to Iowa to meet with voters, sources tell msnbc.
Unlike her 2008 bid, when Clinton sometimes came off as imperious, aides to the all-but-declared presidential candidate say this time she will focus on smaller, intimate events that will allow her to spend quality time with voters and connect with them in casual settings.
But how does the biggest political celebrity in the world go small? How does someone who travels with a large coterie of reporters, aides, and Secret Service do intimate? It’s a challenge the nascent Clinton campaign acknowledges they don’t yet have a perfect solution for, and likely never will.
“It’s really hard,” said former Obama White House communications director Anita Dunn. “You have to balance the needs of the press corps and their wish to be in every event, with trying keep the event from feeling as though a small number of people are performing a staged play for the benefit to the press corps.”
“Candidates love this part,” Dunn continued. “You want to make sure the press can cover the campaigning without becoming the campaign.”
Aides want to showcase Clinton’s warmth and sense of humor, which can be lost in larger events, and bring the high-flying former secretary of state down to the earth. But they acknowledge it won’t be easy and will likely frustrate the press at times.
Every candidate has to deal with this problem at some point if they’re lucky and make it to the big leagues, but Clinton is in the unique position of starting from day one with a footprint closer to that of an incumbent president running for reelection than an upstart primary candidate.
How do Clinton's 2016 and 2008 campaigns compare?
She’s already under Secret Service protection, thanks to her time as first lady, and has had a dedicated traveling press corps for more than a year.
Ryan Williams, a Republican strategist who was Mitt Romney’s press secretary in 2012, thinks Clinton’s team is dreaming.“It’s utterly impossible,” he said. “My guess is Hillary Clinton’s intimate campaign will be nothing more than a staged photo opportunity designed to look like something that it’s not. You’re at a stage where it should be open access to voters, spontaneous interaction with voters, and that’s just going to be very hard for her.”
When Clinton returned to Iowa last year for the first time since she lost the state’s critical caucus in 2008, more than 200 reporters showed up from as far away as Sweden and Japan.
She and her husband pulled up in an eight-car motorcade of armored SUVs, and a metal barricade separated her from voters as she worked a ropeline with federal agents looming on either side of her.
When Romney got Secret Service protection after winning the Republican nomination in 2012, “it was night and day,” Williams said, explaining the agents make everything more complicated and want to preserve a buffer between the candidate and the public.
Clinton’s campaign-in-waiting has worked with the Secret Service to try to pare down the agency’s footprint around Clinton as much as possible, and give the candidate room for spontaneous interactions with voters. They’ll also have to push back on local law enforcement, who often seek to add a second, more visible layer of protection around candidates.
But Robert Gibbs, the former White House press secretary who traveled with Obama extensively during the primary, said Clinton’s team is smart to focus on small events. “There’s no doubt that the logistics are hugely challenging for these things,” he said. “But the pictures are really great, and those stories are the kind that candidates tell for the rest of the campaign.”
And Gibbs said Clinton handled this well in New Hampshire, when a flurry of town hall events helped her come from behind to beat Obama.
Iowa native Tommy Vietor, another former Obama aide who helped Clinton with her book tour last year, said the issue will sort itself out over time.
He predicted a huge crush of press coverage for Clinton’s initial foray on the campaign trail that will die down quickly. “If she spends time in Iowa, her events will be competing with Rand Paul and Ted Cruz going for the jugular, and that will make for sexier copy, and she’ll have a chance to have a slightly more relaxed conversation with voters,” he said.
And campaigns have long known that the further they venture from Des Moines, the fewer reporters who will be willing to make the trek. “It’s totally doable,” he said.
Still, no one disputes that reporters will end up frustrated at times. Some events may be closed to the press, others may have limited access, and many may have access to only a select “pool” of reporters who represent each type of outlet on behalf of their colleagues.
To offset perceptions that’s cutting off the press, Clinton may regularly take questions from reporters after events where some were denied access. Or she could prioritize local media and give a few minutes to the local TV affiliate or newspaper, like Obama did during the primary.
The format of the events could further inflame relations between Clinton and the press, which she acknowledged are “complicated,” but pooling coverage may be the only way to satisfy all sides. After all, Clinton wants reporters to cover her small events as much as they want to cover them. If a touching connection is made with an Iowa voter and there’s no reporter around to Tweet it, does it make a sound?
The awkwardness of huge media attention combined with small spaces was on display last month when Jeb Bush visited the house of a former state Republican Party chairman in New Hampshire. Aides removed the furniture from the living room and reporters piled in.
C-SPAN broadcast live from the kitchen, showing a room packed wall-to-wall with reporters watching a handful of voters chat.
Hillary Clinton's 2016 Campaign Kickoff Will Look a Lot Like Her 2000 Senate Run [Emily Schultheis, National Journal, April 10, 2015]
Hillary Clinton’s 2016 launch will mimic a number of features of her successful 2000 Senate run.
April 10, 2015 Hillary Clinton's 2008 primary loss looms large at every step of her 2016 campaign, but the Democratic frontrunner's team is looking farther back for lessons from the past, namely to the summer of 1999. That was when Clinton—then the first lady and still living in the White House—embarked on a "listening tour" across the state of New York ahead of the official launch of her 2000 Senate campaign.
Now, as she prepares to officially start her campaign Sunday, Clinton's plans are strikingly similar. Out are the mega-rallies. Instead, the candidate is planning a series of smaller, less-scripted events that allow her to interact one-on-one with voters. And on both her 1999 listening tour and her 2016 kickoff, the goal is the same: build the candidate's credentials as one that connects with voters, knows the issues they care about and makes it clear she isn't taking anything for granted.
"In 1999, it was an introduction to voters, it was an introduction to her as a candidate," said Lee Miringoff, a veteran pollster at Marist College in New York. "That's why it worked for her, because it sort of took on the issue directly that she wasn't from New York and therefore was going to have to do some listening."
Karen Finney, an aide to Clinton at the time and a staffer for her emerging 2016 campaign, said the former secretary of State is "very good at making the people who she's talking with very comfortable and at ease." In thinking about the current campaign, Finney added that Clinton herself will play a big role in how comfortable and connected voters feel at events like these.
That will be critical for Clinton to right the problems that sundered her 2008 effort. Then, as now, she was the frontrunner bolstered by a massive campaign funding apparatus and a legion of political connections. But she didn't build the personal connection with Democratic voters that then-candidate Obama rode to victory.
Among the biggest questions about the up-close-and-personal approach is whether Clinton will be to create events that actually feel intimate, given the political and media circus that already track her every move. Some say that true one-on-one interaction for her is near impossible. "It's a tremendous challenge to be an average person when 200 people follow you everywhere," said veteran New York Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf.
Ann Lewis, a longtime Clinton adviser who was involved in the 2000 Senate effort, said that with increased national attention to presidential politics, they've become more "ceremonial"—making it hard for voters to see the actual human being behind the celebrities presidential hopefuls become. "It gets harder, obviously with the size of the press corps and the size of the attention," she said. "My guess is there will be a certain tension in there between what the campaign hopes to achieve, and just the reality of how much attention it is likely to get."
In 1999, Clinton kicked off her listening tour at the Pindars Corners, New York, farm of retiring Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whom she was running to replace. According to The Washington Post at the time, protesters stood outside with signs like "Hillary Listen: Go Home!" or "A New Yorker for New York."
The carpetbagger issue was one she addressed directly that day. "It's a fair question," she told reporters there. "I have some work to do to demonstrate that what I'm for is as important if not more important than where I'm from."
After the farm, her tour took her outside of New York City and its suburbs, which make up the Democratic core of the state, and into all of the state's 62 counties—including significant time in the traditionally Republican upstate. And mainly, the 1999 tour was about proving that she could handle New York issues and had a genuine interest in the state and its people. The events varied: Some were small meet-and-greets at a diner or a farm; others involved a speech to a bigger group, aides from the 2000 campaign said, with Clinton shaking hands and meeting voters on the rope line afterward.
In her 2003 memoir Living History, Clinton described it as "getting a nonstop crash course in New York and its issues," adding that it took time before voters stopped viewing her as "a curiosity" and started having "real conversations about the issues that mattered to them."
It wasn't immediate: the initial listening tour events weren't quite as small as the ones that later became a big part of her campaigning style. And even then, Clinton's star power meant she traveled with a large press corps in tow—the New York press corps can be large and unruly, and the level of interest in a First Lady running for office brought national reporters along for the ride too. Events near New York City tended to succumb more to the political circus, former aides said; ones far upstate were often far smaller and felt more intimate. ("What a lot of us really enjoyed about going upstate is that you could do those kinds of events," Finney said.)
At events, Clinton would listen, nodding her head and taking notes in the notebooks she carried with her to events—her way of showing she was really paying attention, aides say. "She would come back to the campaign office with notebooks full of notes," Lewis said, adding that "you could watch in her early years in the Senate" as ideas she'd written down in the notebooks made their way into policy proposals. (Her body language didn't go unnoticed by the press: "Now Playing In Our Area: Nodding Hill," said one Newsday headline out of the tour, in a play on the 1999 movie "Notting Hill.")
Though she had a few slip-ups along the way, Clinton generally received high marks for the tour—and on the whole, it did what it set out to do. "Something like that can achieve the goal even if she flubs a line here and there, because the notion, by its title, it suggests that you're reaching out and taking in," Miringoff said.
Hillary Clinton, First Lady, on Gay Marriage: A Case Study In Opacity [Sasha Issenberg, Bloomberg, April 10, 2015]
A trove of papers released yesterday at the Clinton library shows that, even before homebrew e-mail servers were an option, Hillary Clinton’s operation had mastered low-tech workarounds to avoid leaving a paper trail of her real-time views on controversial subjects.
LITTLE ROCK — A trove of papers released yesterday at the Clinton library shows that, even before homebrew e-mail servers were an option, Hillary Clinton’s operation had mastered low-tech workarounds to avoid leaving a paper trail of her real-time views on controversial subjects.
Even though the First Lady maintained her own correspondence office, in at least once instance, her staffers punted an inquiry about her views on a timely controversial issue then dividing Democrats to her husband’s staff.
“We have received a few letters on the subject of same-sex marriage,” Alice J. Pushkar of the first lady’s staff wrote to Kyle M. Baker, on her husband’s side of the White House, on September 18, 1996. “I think that it would be more appropriate for a response to come from the President on this than the First Lady. Would it be possible to get a First Lady version of the P-323?”
“What DOMA did is at least allow the states to act.”
Later that day, Baker’s office generated a form letter, which is among the hundreds of thousands of previously unreleased papers made public. “Thank you for contacting Hillary regarding marriages of couples of the same gender. She has asked me to respond on her behalf,” read the letter approved for Bill Clinton’s auto-pen signature. “In 1992, I stated my opposition to same-gender marriage, and recently, when the issue was raised in Congress, I said that if a bill consistent with my previously stated position reached my desk, I would sign it.”
A little more than 24 hours after that letter was prepared, Clinton did sign the Defense of Marriage Act, ignominiously doing so past midnight in an empty White House without any cameras present. In a contemporaneous signing statement, a belated effort to placate liberal supporters he knew abhorred the bill, Clinton expressed worry that it could serve to “provide an excuse for discrimination.”
Hillary Clinton appeared to get through the election season without having to commit to a position of her own. In an interview earlier that year with the San Francisco Examiner’s Carla Marinucci, she had said that her “preference is that we do all we can to strengthen traditional marriages” but did not share her view of same-sex unions. Promoting her book It Takes a Village, Clinton told Marinucci that “children are better off if they have a mother and a father,” but also that “there are people who are able to fulfill the functions of child rearing who don’t fit into the traditional pattern.”
 As a Senate candidate, Clinton couldn't maintain the ambiguity. In January 2000, she said she would have voted for the Defense of Marriage Act and, despite supporting some rights for same-sex couples, she did not believe that they should be entitled to marry. "Marriage has got historic, religious and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time and I think a marriage is as a marriage has always been, between a man and a woman,” she said then.
In 2013, after she left the State Department, Clinton said she had changed her position and now favored recognition of gay marriages. But even last year, fifteen months after her husband conceded in a Washington Post op-ed that he had come around to the view that the Defense of Marriage Act had always been unconstitutional, Hillary appeared to be still defending the bill, at least on practical grounds.
“What DOMA did is at least allow the states to act,” she told NPR’s Terry Gross in an interview that turned contentious when Clinton was asked to trace her change of opinion on the gay marriage. “It wasn't going yet to be recognized by the federal government, but at the state level there was the opportunity. And my husband, you know, was the first to say that, you know, the political circumstances, the threats that were trying to be alleviated by the passage of DOMA thankfully were no longer so preeminent and we could keep moving forward, and that's what we're doing.”
Hillary Clinton threatens to steal Marco Rubio's thunder [Daniel Lippman, POLITICO, April 10, 2015]
Hillary Clinton’s campaign launch could steal some of the media coverage of Marco Rubio’s own campaign announcement.
Marco Rubio’s parade is in danger of getting rained on. His advisers had closely monitored Hillary Clinton’s possible announcement date to ensure that the Florida senator could own the news cycle for his own launch.
Looks like their forecasts were off.
For their part, the Rubio camp and independent GOP strategists are saying they are not worried about bad timing, and believe it could even help him by creating a split-screen effect in which Rubio is paired up with Clinton instead of the whole Republican field.With Clinton expected to kick off her presidential campaign on Sunday with a social media announcement, the Florida senator could see his own launch event in Miami on Monday evening overshadowed by the Hillary media coverage.
“To the extent that Hillary’s entrance is going to increase interest in the 2016 race, we welcome that,” said Rubio spokesman Alex Conant.

“I have no concerns,” he added. “Not a single reporter has said that they’re not coming because Hillary Clinton is going to announce a web video.”

He said that Rubio’s message that the American dream is being threatened is independent of who else is in the race and the timing of their announcements. To keep Rubio in the spotlight, they’ve scheduled several network interviews over the course of the week, and Fox News’ Sean Hannity plans to interview Rubio on Monday night after his speech.

“We really like the contrast the American people are going to see over Sunday and Monday,” Conant said.

GOP strategist Ben Porritt said the timing may not be ideal for Rubio, but that his camp shouldn’t be overly worried. He said Rubio and Clinton clearly have different audiences.

“If you had to go back in time, and you’re Sen. Rubio, you would love to have the whole day to yourself, but you can’t,” Porritt said.


And media attention is far from the only metric that determines the success of a kick-off. Money is critical too, Porritt said, and Rubio’s announcement should lead to a “huge boom in fundraising” in the 48 to 72 hours after his speech.

GOP operative Ana Navarro tweeted on Friday that “Anybody who thinks a Hillary video on Sun will overshadow a Marco speech on Mon, has either never seen a Hillary video or a Marco speech…”


Republican strategist Doug Heye said there was “enough oxygen for both announcements to get a lot of coverage” and Clinton can be the “best foil” that a Republican like Rubio could have.

But Heye said Rubio would be wise to tweak his speech with fresh barbs against Clinton, using her own words from the day before against her.




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