Hillary Rodham Clinton made no mention of her potential Republican rivals when kicking off her second campaign for president.
They didn’t share her restraint.
Rand Paul put Clinton at the center of his first television ad, titled “Liberty, not Hillary.” On Twitter, Scott Walker fired off a series of messages describing Clinton as having a “Washington-knows-best mentality.” Jeb Bush derided the “Obama-Clinton foreign policy” in a video message.
Wrote South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham on Twitter, “The middle class is getting screwed by the administration’s domestic agenda & I believe it would be more of the same with Clinton.”
While there are serious policy differences among the dozen or so major Republicans considering a run for president, they appear to have all concluded there’s little downside in starting early when it comes to going after Clinton — an opponent that only one of them has the chance to potentially face.
Even former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 nominee, couldn’t resist taking a shot at Clinton on Sunday.
“Hillary Clinton is just not trustworthy,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” ”She’s a creature of Washington.”
Meantime, she hit the road — quite literally.
Clinton left Sunday on a road trip from her home in Chappaqua, New York, in a van headed for Iowa, home of the nation’s first presidential caucuses.
The former secretary of state will hold her first campaign event on Tuesday in eastern Iowa. The road trip was Clinton’s idea, aides said.
Longtime aide Huma Abedin, in a conference call with Clinton alumni, said that Clinton’s van stopped at a gas station in Pennsylvania, where the former first lady and New York senator met a family from Michigan.
A Clinton aide said the van is nicknamed “Scooby” after the Mystery Machine van in the 1970s animated television show, “The Scooby Doo Show.” The aide said Clinton was a passenger and the van was driven by the Secret Service. The trip will cover roughly 1,000 miles between Clinton’s home in New York City’s suburbs and Iowa. Clinton expects to arrive in the state on Monday and is appearing at a community college in Monticello, Iowa, on Tuesday.
In the hours before she formally entered the race in a video posted to her website on Sunday, Clinton was subject to withering criticism from Republicans such as Romney who showed up on the Sunday morning political talk shows. In the hours that followed, there was more of the same — with the added request for donations.
Bush hit up supporters with a fundraising appeal to help him stop Clinton’s “liberal agenda.” Paul started selling “Hillary’s Hard Drive” on his website, a not-so-subtle reference to Clinton’s use of a personal email account and server while serving as secretary of state.
The salvos at Clinton come amid an already-underway effort by the Republican National Committee and a series of conservative groups to paint Clinton in a negative light. At least 10 political organizations list defeating Clinton as their primary mission in their filings with the Federal Election Commission, and Democrats say they’re preparing to face much as $500 million worth of attack ads during the 2016 election.
While the early efforts aim to highlight Clinton’s potential vulnerabilities, Republicans also see these initial emails, videos and tweets as an opportunity to collect valuable email addresses and other data about potential supporters.
“Ninety-eight percent of our focus has been on Hillary for the last year,” said Sean Spicer, the chief strategist and communications director of the Republican National Committee. “And having all this digital political and communication assets focused on Hillary gives us a massive advantage. It’s one thing to motivate your base, it’s another thing to activate them.”
Republican strategists say the Clinton-focused messages appeal to primary voters by demonstrating a candidate’s ability to take her on in the general election.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s team was initially concerned that coverage of Clinton’s announcement would crowd out coverage of their splashy Monday night rally that’s expected to kick off his 2016 campaign. They later concluded the almost overlapping events would draw a powerful contrast between Rubio, the 43-year-old senator, and Clinton, who is almost 25 years his senior.
It’s a calculus that didn’t occur, or didn’t matter, to Clinton. Her video, shared hundreds of thousands of times in the first hour after being posted online, said nothing about anyone else in the 2016 race.
An old Clinton rival from Arkansas who is also considering a run for president, former Gov. Mike Huckabee, predicted that silence won’t last.
“Anyone who thinks that she’s going to get into this halfheartedly, well, they’ve never ever encountered the will, the spirit, the heart and the determination of the Clinton political machinery,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”
(AP)
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5 Responses
Not attacking her may be the best strategy, since the real objection to Hillary is that she is just another politician – but except for Dr. Carson, so are all the Republican candidates. For them to criticize her for being a politician is an exemple of what the goyim say is “The pot calling the kettle black.”
what akuperma doesnt understand is that there are two types of politicians nowadays establishment and non-establishment of which rubio and cruz are
Attacking Hillary is easy – she is a creep, almost as creepy as Richard Nixon, and maybe just as treacherous. (And, just to be clear, I am a Democrat and will probably vote for the creep no matter who runs as a Republican). But what will be hard for the Republican candidates is to come up with policy proposals that address the concerns of the majority of potential voters in the 2016 presidential election.
Of the Republican comments reported above, the funniest, and lamest, is the criticism of Jeb Bush that the Obama-Clinton foreign policy as terrible. That adjective surely applies to the previous Bush’s foreign policy, far more than it applies to the Obama foreign policy.
In fact, if Jeb Bush is the Republican nominee, that might be the best thing that could happen to the creep’s foreign policy credentials, which look golden next to the prior Bush’s, and the current Bush will be torn between supporting the prior Bush’s disasterous policies and distancing himself from a major portion of the Republican foreign policy establishment.
“what will be hard for the Republican candidates is to come up with policy proposals that address the concerns of the majority of potential voters in the 2016 presidential election.”
Some obvious policy topics that indeed Republican candidates (and even tea party conservatives like myself) need to REALISTICALLY address:
Jobs: Overall, the jobless rate is nearly back to what it was before the recession began. But if we dig deeper, the recovery looks remarkably uneven. Unemployment among black Americans—11 percent in the fourth quarter of 2014—remains higher than the overall rate at the peak of the recession and well above the rate among black Americans before the recession began. Similar disparities exist between cities and states. Progressive economists have called for new, targeted public investment in job creation, to get us to full employment. What public investments will you demand so that all of America recovers from the 2007 crash? Can there be a second stimulus for the people and communities left behind?
Inequality: A key question all candidates should address is how can we boost hourly wages for the large majority of American workers who have seen their pay stagnate even as the economy grew over the past three-and-a-half decades. This crisis is at the root of nearly every troubling economic trend with us today—rising income inequality, persistent poverty, failure to boost economic mobility, and increasingly anemic recoveries following economic downturns. There is no one silver policy bullet that would get wage growth in gear. It will take an intentional reorientation of policy across the spectrum, including tax and budget policies, regulations, trade and macroeconomic policy. In this mix, where does Hillary Clinton see labor reforms like strengthening workers’ ability to bargain collectively and paid family sick leave? How would she work with Congress to pass such measures? (Josh Bivens, Economic Policy Institute)
Student debt
Education
Wall Street and Washington: Last year in an op-ed for Politico, Senator Elizabeth Warren warned that a disproportionate number of people from the banking industry have been appointed to policy-making positions within the government. She singled out Citigroup in particular, noting that three of the last four Treasury secretaries, beginning with Robert Rubin, whom your husband appointed, were former Citigroup CEOs. Do you think Citigroup or Wall Street in general is overrepresented in Washington? And if so, what would you do about it? (Richard Kim)
Pentagon Spending
Immigration: Our broken immigration reform system is not working for anyone in America.
Iran
NATO Expansion: Do you think NATO expansion, which began under Bill Clinton, has played a positive role in contributing to the security and stability of East and Central Europe? If so, why?”
Social Security
Climate
Campaign finance
Drug Policy
#1, #2
Cruz as well
Rubio is rather establishment