Hillary Clinton will announce her second run for the presidency on Sunday, starting her campaign as the Democrats’ best hope of fending off a crowded field of lesser-known Republican rivals and retaining the White House.
The overwhelming favourite for the Democratic presidential nomination, Clinton will nonetheless face multiple challenges as she returns to the campaign trail seven years after losing the nomination in 2008 to Barack Obama.
She has been a high-profile figure in American politics for more than two decades since her husband, Bill Clinton, won the presidency in 1992. Her fame still eclipses the other likely Democratic contenders and Republican opponents.But with the fame comes a set of challenges Clinton will need to overcome in the coming months.
A Democrat close to the Clinton camp told Reuters on Friday that Clinton, who is also a former U.S. senator, would announce her long-anticipated plans through video and social media.
After the announcement, she will travel to the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, said the source, who asked to remain unidentified.
Clinton, 67, has sounded out potential campaign themes during public appearances, casting herself as both a love-filled new grandmother with a vested concern in the future and a wise former diplomat who understands how countries thrive and fail.
Only 2 % of Americans say they have never heard of her, according to a Gallup poll last month, a level of name recognition exceeding that of Vice President Joe Biden, a name unknown to a 10 % of Americans.
Clinton’s use of social media to announce her White House run amounts to the adoption of tactics deployed by Obama in 2008 to raise large sums through small donations and appeal to young voters.
Controversy and Criticism
Clinton has been a target for Republican criticism since Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign.
She became a figure of public fascination, and admiration in some quarters, for standing by her husband when allegations of his sexual infidelities first surfaced during his 1992 presidential campaign, and again in 1998 when his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky surfaced.
Both the Clintons have been investigated repeatedly by Republican lawmakers and the then United States Office of the Independent Counsel.
As Hillary Clinton prepared to start her campaign, she faced criticism from Republicans for reliance of the Clinton Foundation, an NGO run by the clintons, on donations and payments from foreign governments for its philanthropy work abroad, even as she served as the country’s top diplomat.Clinton has said she should have used a government email account as secretary of state while insisting that she had violated no rules.
During the campaign, Clinton will be expected to say whether she will more closely align with the centrist economic policies of her husband’s administration or the populist policies championed by the progressive wing of her party.
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