Former US First lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is finally getting set to announce her bid for the 2016 presidential race on Sunday. The 67-year-old Clinton is expected to make the announcement on social media, followed by travels as early as next week to the traditional early-primary States of Iowa and New Hampshire, media accounts said. In what would be her second presidential bid after an epic primary battle that she lost to Barack Obama in 2008, Clinton is already said to have filmed her campaign launch video outlining the broad themes of her renewed effort to become America’s first woman president.
Clinton, who has been topping party polls of probable candidates by a massive margin, will be the first Democrat to enter the 2016 race. While there has been no word from Vice President Joe Biden, some of the names doing the rounds for the Democratic ticket include former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley and former Virginia Senator Jim Webb. There has been decidedly more activity on the Republican side, with two Senators, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, having already announced their bid and a third, Marco Rubio, preparing to follow suit on Monday.
Analysts of the long-winded US presidential process, which is always full of hits and misses, expect it to be another Clinton-Bush encounter, with Hillary possibly taking on Jeb Bush, son of former President George HW Bush, who lost his re-election bid to Bill Clinton in 1992. A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll showed Clinton ahead of Bush by a 54-to-40 per cent margin in a prospective match-up. Bush, who has been testing the waters, is still to signal his plans.
Just ahead of the expected weekend kick-off, Clinton on Friday released to The Huffington Post an excerpt of a new epilogue to her book “Hard Choices” in which she hints that the birth of her granddaughter was a moment that has reinforced her future plans. “Becoming a grandmother has made me think deeply about the responsibility we all share as stewards of the world we inherit and will one day pass on. Rather than make me want to slow down, it has spurred me to speed up,” she writes.