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Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to announce on Sunday that she will seek the presidency for a second time, ending two years of speculation and immediately establishing herself as the likely 2016 Democratic nominee. At the time of going to press, she was yet to make the announcement.
The announcement will effectively begin what could be one of the least contested races, without an incumbent, for the Democratic presidential nomination in recent history - a stark contrast to the 2008 primaries, when Clinton, the early front-runner, ended up in a long and expensive battle won by Barack Obama. It could also be the first time a woman captures a major party's nomination.
Regardless of the outcome, Clinton's 2016 campaign will open a new chapter in the extraordinary life of a public figure who has captivated and polarised the country since her husband, former President Bill Clinton, declared his intention to run for President in 1991. Clinton was the co-star of the Clinton administration, the only first lady ever elected to the United States Senate and a globe-trotting diplomat who surprised her party by serving dutifully under the president who defeated her.
She will embark on her latest - and perhaps last - bid for the White House with nearly universal name recognition and a strong base of support, particularly among women. But in a campaign that will inevitably be about the future, Clinton, 67, will enter as a quintessential baby boomer, associated with the 1990s and with the drama of the Bill Clinton years.
This campaign will begin on a small scale and build up to an effort likely to cost more than any presidential bid waged before, with Clinton's supporters looking to raise as much as $2.5 billion in a blitz of donations from Democrats who overwhelmingly support her candidacy. Much of that enthusiasm is tied to the chance to make history by electing a woman president. But some, too, owes to the lack of compelling alternatives in a party trying desperately to hold on to the White House when Republicans control the House and the Senate.
Clinton's expected declaration on Sunday is to be followed by a series of intimate but critical campaign events in Iowa and New Hampshire. She will use them to reintroduce herself to voters and begin to lay out the central theme of her candidacy: improving the economic fortunes of the middle class, with an emphasis on increasing wages and reducing income inequality.
Her return to the campaign trail this week offers her a fortuitous circumstance: Tuesday is National Equal Pay Day, the point in the year at which, on average, a woman's pay for working in 2014 and 2015 would equal a man's pay just for 2014. Pay equity is an issue that Clinton's candidacy will take up in earnest, along with others important to many women, like paid family and medical leave, a higher minimum wage and affordable access to child care.
Unlike in her 2008 campaign, when she played down gender and sought to show she was tough enough to be president, Clinton plans to highlight that she is a grandmother and trumpet her chance to make history.
"Being the first woman to run for president with a real chance of winning, that's a wild card, but potentially a net positive, particularly for undecided women," said Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center.
She will also look for ways to demonstrate that, after more than three decades in public life, she understands the ways of modern campaigns and can appeal to younger voters. Clinton's 35-year-old campaign manager, Robby Mook, known for exploiting technology, data and analytics to win elections, has already dispatched field organisers to Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.
For all the months of quiet and careful planning, however, her campaign's slow rollout has not come off as smoothly as envisioned. Rather than gliding into the spotlight as an above-the-fray former secretary of state, Clinton will enter the 2016 race in the midst of lingering questions about her exclusive use of a private email address while at the State Department and about donations from foreign countries to her family's philanthropic foundation.
John D. Podesta, who will serve as Clinton's campaign chairman, assured donors that both controversies would pass and that the momentum would shift as soon as Clinton was officially a candidate, according to a person involved in those discussions.
Clinton will enter the race with a strong base of support: 81 percent of Democrats said they would consider voting for her, according to a CBS News poll conducted in February. That support dwarfs that of her potential rivals for the nomination, including former Gov. Martin O'Malley of Maryland, former Senator Jim Webb of Virginia and Senator Bernard Sanders, an independent from Vermont who could run as a Democrat.
But the roller coaster of a presidential campaign can erode even the most seemingly certain advantages. Just over eight years ago, Clinton began that campaign with an email to supporters declaring that she was "in to win." That announcement began a downward trajectory in which she went from being considered the inevitable nominee to finishing in third place in the Iowa caucuses, behind Obama and John Edwards.
©2015 The New York Times News Service
