America Rising Executive Director Tim Miller has a column out today arguing that Hillary Clinton is already a candidate for president – whether she’ll admit it or not.
What do you call a politician who has close friends running three coordinating Super PACs with a stated goal of laying the groundwork for their presidential campaign? You might call her Hillary Clinton, candidate for President of the United States.
The lazy, cliché take on how the media is covering Hillary Clinton is that there’s too much of an early focus on someone who hasn’t declared her intentions.
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So given that she has close friends building a coordinated family of grassroots, messaging, fundraising, and advertising infrastructure for a campaign and her husband is raising money for them, what exactly are we speculating about again?
If Hillary wants to be treated as a private citizen/celebrity/world traveler who doesn’t have to answer to voters and the media, she should disavow these PACs and ask her friends to stand down while she makes a decision. Short of that, she is a presidential candidate and should be treated as such.
She’s a presidential candidate when she is being paid $200,000 to speak by companies that would lobby her administration should she be elected. She’s a presidential candidate when she’s traveling the country raising money for the Clinton Foundation from the same donor base that would fund her campaign. And she’s a presidential candidate when she’s choosing to avoid taking a stand on issues that might jeopardize her electoral chances.
So how about we shelve the “will she or won’t she” and replace it with more “does she or doesn’t she.”
Read the full column – including a run down of just how close her network of Super PAC friends are on CNN.com