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Post by Admin on Apr 10, 2015 21:29:26 GMT
Hillary Rodham Clinton will end months of speculation about her political future and launch her long-awaited 2016 presidential campaign Sunday, according to people familiar with her plans. The former secretary of state will be making her second bid for president and will enter the race in a strong position to succeed her rival from the 2008 Democratic primary, President Barack Obama. If elected, she would be the nation’s first female president. Clinton has been a high-profile figure in American politics for more than two decades since her husband, Bill Clinton, won the presidency in 1992, and her fame still eclipses her other likely Democratic contenders and Republican opponents. Her advisers, including her husband, have urged her to take nothing for granted, arguing voters would be repelled by anything that resembles a preordained coronation. The first official word that Clinton will seek the Democratic Party’s nomination will come via an online video posted on social media. She’ll then make stops in key early voting states, including Iowa and New Hampshire, where she’ll hold small events with voters. One Democrat familiar with campaign rollout said Clinton’s stops would include visits to people’s homes in those early states. The people familiar with her plans spoke on condition of anonymity. Clinton, 67, has sounded out potential campaign themes during public appearances, casting herself as both a love-filled new grandmother with a vested concern in the future and a wise ex-diplomat who understands how countries thrive and fail. In contrast to her 2008 campaign, Clinton has shown signs she will not play down how being a woman distinguishes her from the 44 men who have previously become president. She has filled speeches with paeans to the moral and economic importance of gender equality and women’s rights, arguing that economic growth, the health of the middle class and the stability of foreign peace treaties all hinge on reducing gender discrimination. “Just think about all the hard-working families that depend on two incomes to make ends meet,” Clinton said in a paid speech at a conference for female technology executives in California’s Silicon Valley.
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Post by Admin on Apr 11, 2015 21:23:57 GMT
She begins her campaign in a politically dominant yet personally diminished position. She has no serious challengers for the Democratic nomination, yet many Democrats say they hope for real competition, whether to provide direction for their party or to prepare her for the general election. She leads her potential Republican rivals in some, but not all, polls, though those polls are not reliable predictors, given how early it is in the race. As secretary of state, she floated above politics and her favorability ratings rose with her. Back in the trenches in the past two years as a prospective candidate and amid controversies over some of her own statements and the uproar over her private e-mail account, she has lost altitude. She must arrest that movement, if she can, as she moves around the country as a candidate. She will receive plenty of advice, from her advisers and the world at large, about how to answer the question of why she wants to be president. The cover of the latest issue of the Economist magazine features a picture of her with the words, “What does Hillary stand for?” As she assembled a campaign team, she has presumably been thinking about what to say about all that. It is what everyone wants to know. Yet so much is known already. There is a decades-long résumé that offers answers, a record of battles fought and won or lost that point to priorities: women’s and children’s issues; economic policies somewhat to the left of her husband’s but not as far left as progressives would like; a focus on the middle class; a belief in education standards but caution about too much reform; a muscular foreign policy, including a vote for the Iraq war resolution that still rankles some in her party. The unknowns are unknown in part because there are few easy answers to some of the questions people want answered. Exactly what is a 21st-century economic plan that can do something about stagnant wages and the lack of economic mobility? Clinton and her Republican rivals face the same quandary on this. It is easy to identify the problems, but difficult from either the left or the right to present plausible alternatives to each party’s old policies. Clinton’s history suggests no big-bang solution to these profound problems, but rather it shows a wealth of smaller initiatives that, however worthy or potentially effective, are not the stuff of grand or uplifting campaign rhetoric. That makes the challenge of answering the question about why she wants to be president all the more difficult. Almost no matter what she offers, people will want more — more specificity, more originality, more inspiration. Clinton has plenty of knowledge about the issues, as well as the capacity to command as much outside expertise as she needs. She can offer lots of white papers on different policies. In late 1991, her husband delivered three speeches that outlined both the New Democratic philosophy and the details of the policies that he wanted to pursue. These were wrapped in a bundle called the New Covenant, and they laid the foundation for his successful presidential campaign.
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Post by Admin on Apr 12, 2015 21:24:08 GMT
Hillary Clinton formally launched her second presidential bid today, vowing to be the champion for "everyday" American families and to strengthen the economy. "Americans have fought their way back from tough economic times, but the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top," Clinton said in a video posted on her website, hillaryclinton.com. "Everyday Americans need a champion. I want to be that champion so you can do more than just get by, so you can get ahead and stay ahead," she said. "Because when families are strong, America is strong." The long-awaited announcement was preceded by an email from campaign chairman John Podesta to supporters, which was first reported by the Associated Press. Podesta says Clinton will first head to Iowa to talk to voters. She'll hold a formal campaign kickoff next month, according to the email. Clinton gave a glimpse of what drives her to reach for history as the first woman elected president of the United States, in the new epilogue she wrote for the paperback edition of Hard Choices, her memoir about her tenure at the State Department. "Becoming a grandmother has made me think deeply about the responsibility we all share as stewards of the world we inherit and will one day pass on," Clinton wrote. "I'm more convinced than ever that our future in the 21st century depends on our ability to ensure that a child born in the hills of Appalachia or the Mississippi Delta or the Rio Grande Valley grows up with the same shot at success that Charlotte (her granddaughter) will." Those close to Clinton say she will run a different campaign than in 2008, when she won 17.5 million votes in the Democratic primary against then-senator Barack Obama. That campaign reminded voters of both Clintons at their best — the ability to inspire female voters — and worst — Bill Clinton's unbridled comments that belittled then-senator Barack Obama. "You have to be talking about the issues where people live and where there experiences are," said Bonnie Campbell, co-chair of Hillary Clinton's 2008 Iowa campaign. " I'm very certain that Hillary understands we just got trounced in an election because we didn't have a message that people didn't understand or we just didn't get out."
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Post by Admin on Apr 13, 2015 21:21:21 GMT
Measured against all the campaign-kickoff speeches that have been made in the past 50 years or so, hers surely tops the list for brevity and casualness. In a video just over two minutes long, a montage of various men, women and children who are all eager to start something new (such as having a baby or tackling a new job) is followed by 30 seconds of the candidate herself, who tells us that she is running for president to fight for "everyday Americans" who need "a champion" in "tough economic times," when "the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top." Thus she throws a populist bone to the Warrenite Dems on the left. But since her campaign is already seeking contributions from everyday Americans like me, I can't understand why our champion will need $2.5 billion of our money to gain the White House. This figure, which is what each major party reportedly plans to spend in quest of the presidency, is more than twice the record amount spent to re-elect President Obama in 2012, and about $700 million more than the total spent for both Romney and Obama in that election. Why does Hillary need $2.5 billion to run for president? Let's be frank. Right now, she already has what no other presidential candidate since FDR has ever had at this stage of the campaign: the nomination of a major political party. She now owns the Democratic nomination. Fifteen-plus months before the Democrats gather in Philadelphia to "choose" their candidate for president, we already know whom they'll choose. There is absolutely no chance that it will be Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, or Martin O'Malley, the former Governor of Maryland who has already been making the rounds in Iowa. It ain't gonna happen for Martin or anyone but Hillary. Unless she falls out of a plane or suddenly decides to smother her baby granddaughter Charlotte, she's got the nomination. But since the press can't bear the prospect of a dead-cert with no suspense for all of fifteen months, commentators such as David Brooks think she ought to be facing primary challengers -- if only to sharpen her rhetorical edge. And even her supporters may feel that it's dangerous for her to take the nomination for granted, to exude -- like a forbidden perfume -- the odious scent of "entitlement." But does this mean that in the runup to the Democratic convention, we must all spend the better part of a year watching debates that can be no more than exhibition games --with no power to change the end result? Does anyone out there remember her last campaign, which was also the first campaign in which she herself was a candidate? In the year 2000, when she ran for the U.S. Senate in the state of New York, her Republican opponent, Congressman Rick A. Lazio, spent almost 40 million dollars and ended up nearly 3 million in the hole. Hillary spent 29 million. And guess who won by 55 to 43 percent? In other words, Hillary has already demonstrated that she can win without even matching what her opponent spends. She won her Senate seat not only because she was well known as the first lady of an astoundingly popular president (even after Monica, Bill Clinton left office with an approval rating of 66 percent), but also because she had earned -- not bought -- the confidence of New York voters.
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Post by Admin on Apr 15, 2015 21:30:45 GMT
All policies and positions aside, her anticipated nomination is the belated righting of a historical wrong: a feminist landmark within reach, almost a century after women achieved the vote in the United States, with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, in 1920, one year after the birth of Dorothy Howell Rodham, Hillary’s mother. Two women have represented the major parties on Presidential ballots before now, but only in the role of Vice-Presidential nominee: Geraldine Ferraro, in 1984, seconding Walter Mondale, and Sarah Palin, in 2008, alternately supporting and undermining John McCain. The Vice-Presidency is frequently a route to the Presidency itself; Hillary’s nomination would present the first opportunity for a woman to be installed in the top job without having to use that side door. But Hillary has been in and out of the White House before, conducted by her husband. This means, inevitably, that her triumph would be a more ambivalent victory than that promised by the abstract idea—or ideal—of the first female President. What does it say to women that their first path to the Presidency is through marriage? What might it someday say to their daughters? For better or worse, President Obama, when running for office and when newly elected, offered a tabula rasa for the projection of hopes and aspirations; some of those dreams have turned out not to have been entirely unfounded. (Millions more Americans now have health insurance, for one thing.) Hillary Clinton, by contrast, reminds us that we’re still a long way away from gender equality. Her candidacy embodies the compromises and the qualifications that so frequently make a woman’s route to success more circuitous and perilous than those of her male peers. “Compromise” or “Settle” makes for a less grabby one-word lapel button than does “Hope,” but such words capture an important aspect of Hillary’s political and domestic persona—one that, in the end, may be no less persuasive and inspiring to those female voters for whom Hillary’s ascent is cause for celebration. In a way, the path that Hillary has taken to arrive where she is—within striking distance of having the job which, two dozen years ago, seemed so beyond her—is a confirmation, not a repudiation, of what most women already know: that a goal is more likely to be arrived at incrementally than it is to be accomplished sweepingly. Once we have elected the first female President whose husband is a former male President, we can elect the first female President whose husband has never held elective office. Eventually, perhaps, we will elect the first female President who is married to a woman, or who isn’t married to anyone—although, admittedly, the alternate universe in which that last might happen still seems many years away. Meanwhile, did you hear the one about the time Bill and Hillary met a cocktail waitress in a bar just outside Hope, Arkansas?
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