Hillary has got it all

It seems like that at least. She learnt a lot from her mistakes in 2008, and she is now avoiding them big time.

Former Secretary of State/Senator/First Lady Hillary Clinton has held her first major campaign event in New York City, 2 months after announcing her much anticipated second run to be the key holder of the White House.

So far she has been lying low, and keeping to herself and to a few voters in the 4 states that will vote first. She only made townhouse visits and rarely gave interviews. She is controlling her representation in the media. But now as the Republican race is heating up and the Democratic field is slowly expanding, she has switched into top gear.

Hillary enlisted pop stars Katy Perry and Mariah Carey, and recently joined Instagram, Snapchat and released her own Spotify playlist. She is campaigning to her millions of followers on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube in both English and Spanish, and sends out text-messages to those who signed up. Her Social Media representation is perfect. She seems perfect. But she is far from it in reality.

Recent polls have shown that more and more Americans think that she is untrustworthy and that she has too many skeletons in her closet. She has recently come under fire for the unavailability of her State Department emails and for the fact that the Clinton Foundation accepted huge donations from foreign leaders. She also has an issue with the fact that together with her husband, in the past few years they earned millions of dollars, while at the same time she claims to be the champion of the middle class and hard working families.

But she is aware of these problems, and is slowly trying to fix them behind the scenes. In the mean time, she is pushing for the vote of the middle class. Women. And Minorities. This sounds like Obama’s third term.

And in a way it is. She is building up on the base that Obama has established, and the fact that the economy is growing is going to be a big advantage for her. She is building up on the social issues, as she wants gay and women rights equality, opportunities for the young people and a fair resolution to the immigration and health issues. She is also advocating for a stronger and more independent United States, and her foreign policy past gives her the credibility to do so. She seems to have it all. She even has a populist economic plan, which puts the families as the top priority.

Her campaign is very smart. It seems like they all have it together, but in US Presidential Politics, anything can happen. And very few people know that more than Hillary.

And lastly, she wants the campaign to be about her and the people she is doing all of this for. She could have paraded Bill all throughout, but he only appeared briefly at the end. In fact in the past 2 months he rarely made any campaign stops, and only gave a few interviews, in which he praised her like she is god. Hillary is playing the Bill card very safely, because she knows that it can end very badly for her, when Bill overtakes the discussions.

In the meantime, she seems to be going strong and be close to unstoppable. Having said that, O’Malley, Sanders and Chafee haven’t started their main campaigns yet. And there are likely to be a few more candidates announcing soon. Especially on the Republican side, as Jeb Bush is expected to enter the race tomorrow. No doubt, she will be carefully analyzing her opponents, because the Republican field hasn’t been this strong in decades, and if she wants to win this time around, she has got to watch out for their candidates.

It certainly is going to be a tough and unpredictable race.

Appeared simultaneously on The Moderate (www.themodcon.com) on 14th June 2015.