In probably the least surprising news of the year, Hillary Clinton has announced that she is a candidate for President in 2016. She decided to forgo a rousing speech to thousands of cheering supporters and instead simply released a video:
I’m not sure how this “I’m just another one of the folks getting ready for the future” shtick will play (a little too humble?), but I was pleased to hear her acknowledge from the start that “the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top.”
(And I can assure you that you won’t be seeing happy gay couples in any of the videos from Republican candidates for President.)
Whether this means she’ll be willing to denounce head-on some of the big players on Wall Street who helped wreck the economy in 2008 and who have supported her in the past remains to be seen. As Danny Vinik noted in The New Republic:
Clinton has long cultivated close ties to Wall Street. In the 2008 presidential election, she received more than $7 million in donations from the “Securities and Investment” industry, according to the Center for Responsible Politics. That included nearly $450,000 from JPMorgan Chase and around $400,000 each from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Only EMILY’s List and DLA Piper, a law firm, gave more to Clinton. Other banks like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch also gave her sizeable donations.
The money didn’t stop flowing over the past few years either. Since Clinton left the State Department, she has earned millions of dollars in speaking fees at events across the country, including ones sponsored by Wall Street. In October 2013, for instance, Clinton gave two speeches at Goldman Sachs, which, if Goldman paid her customary speaking fee, netted her a cool $400,000.
It’s still hard for me to imagine Clinton saying, as Senator Elizabeth Warren did:
There’s a lot of talk coming from Citigroup about how the Dodd-Frank Act isn’t perfect.
So let me say this to anyone who is listening at Citi: I agree with you. Dodd-Frank isn’t perfect.
It should have broken you into pieces.
Also I can’t imagine Clinton doing what Warren did when the senator used the reported threat by Citigroup and JPMorgan to withhold all or part of their contributions to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee as a fundraising tool.
I appreciated her acknowledgement that as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, she thought it was a failure not to aid the anti-Assad rebels in Syria in the early stages of the uprising against his regime, and that Obama’s stated foreign policy goal (“Don’t do stupid shit”) is “not an organizing principle.”
And while I have mixed feelings about former Virginia Senator Jim Webb, who is considering seeking the Democratic nomination, I’d like to see him get in the race just to make things more interesting and force Clinton to sharpen some of her positions.
At any rate, as things stand now, she has an almost sure lock on the Democratic nomination and is a favorite to beat any of the likely Republican prospects for president in 2016– even while the overwhelmingly favorable ratings she once had have declined.
And Fox News and the rightwing echo machine notwithstanding, I am quite sure that neither Benghazi nor her use of email while Secretary of State will have a serious impact on the campaign. Which isn’t to say that something genuinely damaging will never come up.
And no, I don’t have anything specific in mind. But you can expect to be able to fill this card rather quickly.
Update: And now a word from the last Republican candidate for president:
Take the pledge to #StopHillary. http://t.co/dAV3Lxitjm Sign & join 100,000 strong for a Republican White House. pic.twitter.com/bGw2ZSSJmL
— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) April 12, 2015
