There is an Indonesian pancake called a martabak. To make it properly requires heat at the top and heat at the bottom. "For anything to succeed today you need high-level, skilled, committed leadership, leadership that values, leadership that can make a difference," says Melanne Verveer, former chief of staff to Hillary Clinton and a close friend of the Democratic politician, using the Javanese pancake as a metaphor for effective political engagement. "You also need the heat at the bottom. You need people working for change in their communities and raising their voices."
Verveer, speaking about Clinton's role in engaging the women of Northern Ireland in the peace process, could just as easily have been talking about the challenge that the former first lady, senator and secretary of state faces as she prepares to make one of the United States' most eagerly anticipated political announcements: that she is going to run again for the US presidency.
It is eight years and 81 days since the New York senator, sitting in a living room, speaking directly to a camera, first announced that she was running for the presidency and “beginning a conversation” in which she would use new media to try to speak to everyone in their living rooms.
She tried but came up short. Outmanoeuvred by an exciting candidate, in Barack Obama, who was promising change to a public fed up with eight years of George W Bush, she failed to generate the same heat at the bottom.
The freshman senator’s come-from- behind campaign used a superb media strategy to build a vast grassroots network and get voters out. Simply put, he got into more living rooms.
Clinton is politically hot again and on top. Right now, with no candidate of Obama's calibre offering an electable alternative, she appears a shoo-in to win the Democratic presidential nomination.
Despite the recent controversy about her use of a private email account instead of a government one to conduct business as secretary of state, she is still polling almost five times the level of support of her nearest potential Democratic challengers: the liberal Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who has ruled out running, and Vice President Joe Biden, who is undecided – and would be almost 74 at the election.
Although she lost support in the polls, damaged by voter perceptions of her honesty and empathy, an ABC News/Washington Post survey earlier this month put Clinton 12 points ahead of the top Republican candidate Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and brother and son of former presidents, in a hypothetical general-election race. Her lead was even greater against the next highest-polling likely Republican contenders: the Florida senator Marco Rubio, the Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, and the Texas senator Ted Cruz.
Washington commentators are feverishly anticipating another "I'm in to win" announcement from Clinton any day. For months it has been a question of when rather than if. Even though 576 days remain until the election, and just two candidates have declared themselves so far – Cruz and the Kentucky senator Rand Paul, who announced his candidacy on Tuesday – there is expected to be a series of proclamations in April and May as candidates move early to bank as much cash from big donors in an election race that is expected to far exceed the $1.7 billion spent by the candidates (and an additional almost $500 million by outside groups) in 2012.
Washington was abuzz last week with news that Clinton had picked hipsters over hillbillies by signing a lease for offices in cool Brooklyn for her campaign headquarters. The lease on 1 Pierrepont Plaza, in Brooklyn Heights, was less interesting than the fact that the deal started the clock on the 15 days that federal election rules allow politicians from starting campaign activity to announcing their candidacy.
Candidacy announcement
According to the British newspaper the
Guardian
, the announcement will come at noon on Sunday, when, it reported online, Clinton will tweet her intentions while en route to Iowa. The announcement, the newspaper reported, will be followed by a video and email statement and then a series of conference calls with key advisers in battleground states, charting Clinton’s swing through Iowa and other important early-voting states.
The plan ticks two important boxes: announcing on social media points to a smarter digital campaign that would appeal directly to younger voters; her whistle-stop tour puts Clinton, in a quick burst and with some fanfare, out in a field that many prospective candidates have been tilling for months.
The timing has the added bonus for Clinton of kicking dirt in the eye of Marco Rubio, the Cuban-American Republican senator for Florida, who is due to announce his own campaign with a set piece at Freedom Tower, a historic site for immigrant Cubans in Miami, on Monday.
Bill Clinton is said to view Rubio as a particular threat to his wife’s presidential ambitions. The 43-year-old has landed some heavy blows on 67-year-old Hillary Clinton, needling her repeatedly on the generational divide and dismissing her as being wedded to policies “of the past”. In his recent book he said that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be “nothing more than a third Obama term” and that another Clinton president would be “a death blow to the American dream”.
For a candidate who would, at 69, be the oldest person, after Ronald Reagan, to be sworn in as president, announcing her intentions via social media would have the additional benefit of avoiding a set-piece event in the gaze of the media, with whom the scandal-prone Clintons have a hate-hate relationship.
Admitting last month that her relationship with the media has been “at times, shall we say, complicated”, she tried to charm with humour at a journalism gala: “I’m all about new beginnings – a new grandchild, a new hairstyle, a new email account, a new relationship with the press.”
The American media have been waiting too long to be satisfied with just soundbites. A flurry of announcements suggests Clinton is hiring every hotshot operative in the world of Democratic politics. An expected $1 billion war chest will mean plenty of work to go around.
“She is being much more inclusive of getting the best talent from all around, so she won’t be relying on the same old friends,” says Brian O’Dwyer, the Irish-American lawyer and Clinton supporter, when asked about what mistakes she made in 2008 that she won’t be repeating.
One new friend hired this week was the Google executive Stephanie Hannon, who will oversee Clinton’s technology team and find new ways for the former first lady to engage with voters. Hannon will join a team of long-time Clinton loyalists such as John Podesta, her campaign’s expected chairman – and former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton – her campaign manager-in-waiting Robby Mook, who at 35 is already a veteran of Clinton’s 2008 campaign, and her incoming communications chief Jennifer Palmieri, who will follow Podesta from the Obama White House.
Setting aside bitterness
The Obama and Clinton camps have set aside the bitterness of the 2008 Democratic primary race as Clinton taps the digitally minded and social-media-savvy Obama alumni in an attempt to replicate some of the magic of the president’s winning campaigns.
The spectre of Clinton’s loss to Obama in Iowa, the rural backwater that is the first state in the US to pick the presidential candidates, looms large over her next presidential bid. That shock defeat in the 2008 Iowa caucus showed his far superior grassroots operation and his ability to raise the temperature at the bottom.
“Grassroots organising still matters in an era of television and big money. In caucus states you cannot get away with just walking in and counting on your name brand to win you support,” says Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. “She learned that the hard way. Obama came out organised in every caucus state, and that is the biggest lesson she has to learn and correct.”
Many expect more unguarded moments from Clinton, like the time she cried in the New Hampshire primary, in 2008, while talking about the strains of the campaign trail. That out-of-character moment from the ice-cool control queen propelled her to an improbable victory over Obama in that key-state ballot, in which she became the first woman to win a US national primary. Expect many more touchy-feely, woman-of-the-people moments this time around as she fights to repeat such wins.
“I expect her campaign to be very grassroots-oriented,” says Bakari Sellers, a former state representative in South Carolina – another state to hold an early primary – and a chairman of Obama’s 2008 campaign team in the first southern primary state. “She will not necessarily be in a motorcade, but instead it will be madam secretary shaking hands and having young girls being able to run up to her and touch her.”
Clintonistas point to Hillary’s successful campaign to win a senate seat for New York in 2000 as a potential template. During that campaign she embarked on a statewide “listening tour”, and the perceived blow-in won approval even in Republican parts of the state. “That was powerful,” says Stella O’Leary, the founder of Irish American Democrats, who is close to Clinton. “She started out being viewed as a carpetbagger and ended up with people saying that she had fresh ideas. Whether she can do that nationally or not I don’t know.”
Republicans mock Hillaryland’s down-to-earth launch plan to engage with voters at low-key events as some kind of grand strategy. “What is a campaign about? It’s about voters,” says Sean Spicer, the Republican National Committee’s chief strategist and communications director. “What is Scott Walker” – the Wisconsin governor – “doing? He’s engaging with voters. This is a total cover that this is some grand plan. They just don’t have that kind of relationship with voters. If you have been on the national stage since 1992 and don’t excite voters, you know you have a problem.”
Grassroots fans
For Clinton things are very different from 2008. She has not just the mistakes of her last presidential run to learn from – the failure to organise in first-voting states – but also a lot more money and better support. Ready for Hillary, the “super Pac” – or political action committee – that can raise unlimited funds as long as it is not connected to the candidate, has not only raised $13 million but also, more importantly, built an army of grassroots fans ready to work for Clinton on day one of her campaign.
Clinton’s biggest advantage is that she doesn’t have a strong challenger like Obama. The former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, a left-wing progressive, has only recently become an outspoken critic of her but is polling at just 1.2 per cent on average, compared with Clinton’s 59.8 per cent, according to the political website RealClearPolitics.
He fired a dart at Clinton (and Jeb Bush) when he said that the presidency was “not some crown to be passed between two families”. The dynasty thing doesn’t seem to bother Americans, though, given Jeb Bush’s poll results. There is a sense of nostalgia around Bill Clinton’s presidency that, for the time being, avoids a more forensic look at the way some of his policies are at odds with those of far-left progressives – the electrifying force in the Democratic Party.
Any concern that Hillary Clinton is not a new face, or about her husband’s social and economic policies and the couple’s ties to Wall Street, will be trumped by progressives’ eagerness to keep the presidency away from Republicans who have ground Congress to a halt. Clinton’s universal name recognition puts her in a prime position to achieve that.
“Democrats want to win, and that is really what she brings to the table: she is a very tough partisan fighter,” says Julian Zelizer of Princeton. “After years where many Democrats feel that Obama has been pushed around, they are very determined to keep control of the White House.”
Although Clinton has plenty of experience being tested in the political arena, the absence of a strong Democratic rival could weaken her in a head-to-head with a Republican. “Campaigns are like a sport,” says Spicer. “If you are not training you will get out of shape. Without a credible challenge to sharpen her policies and debating points, it will put her at a major disadvantage.”
Clinton critics point to the recent controversy about her use of the private email address for official business and the controversy around the foreign-government and big-business donations to the family’s charitable foundation as evidence of persistent flaws in the Clintons’ character: their sense of entitlement, their own set of rules.
Her closest friends disagree. “She will take nothing for granted, assuming that she is going to make the race,” says Melanne Verveer. “She will work hard and run the kind of campaign that will reach out to everybody – no matter what part of the country, what party, what age group – to talk about the kind of America we all want to see.”
Popular with women
Clinton holds an advantage with a key group of voters. In polls she scores no worse among men than a typical Democratic politician but fares far better among women: Gallup has put support for Clinton among women at 56 per cent, the highest for any
Democrat
or Republican considering a run for the White House. She has been talking more frequently about gender equality and women’s issues, subjects that excite the kind of moderate and swing voters who help win presidential elections.
Last time Clinton's gender was a topic she chose not to raise until she conceded defeat to Obama, a mistake she won't repeat in 2016 as she aims to become the first female president of the United States.
“There are 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling, but the ceiling is not totally cracked yet,” says Verveer, whom Obama made the first US ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues. “As somebody who just has enormous respect for Hillary Clinton and her capabilities, seeing first hand the way she works and how strongly committed she is to what this country stands for, if any woman’s time has come, I think her time has come.”
