Shhhh! Hillary Clinton is stealthily running again in 2020. Spread it around very very quietly and be sure you only talk about the 2018 midterm elections.
Washington Post reporter Robert Costa is sending the not so subtle signal that Hillary Clinton will be back again in 2020. However, since she has to do it on the sly, Costa portrays her as semi-secretly helping in select 2018 midterm campaigns. His focus is on 2018 but he reveals enough to let us know that it is really all about 2020 in Hillary Clinton, a favorite GOP foil, plans discreet 2018 strategy:
There was a long line for selfies with Hillary Clinton last week at a Georgetown soiree for Lanny Davis, a Clinton loyalist whose latest book blames former FBI director James B. Comey for her 2016 presidential defeat.
Clinton devotees — waiting patiently within earshot — speculated about her future. Maybe, one asked, she’d leave political winter behind and become President Trump’s foil? Another talked up a 2020 comeback.
Clinton smiled, but did not respond.
Did you see that? He wrote "2020 comeback." Just don't act too excited as we go through the motions that it is really all about the 2018 midterms...for now.
In the first electoral season since the stunning loss that extinguished her years-long drive for the presidency, Clinton, 70, has begun a discreet and low-profile reentry into the political fray.
But only into the 2018 political fray. 2020 has never even entered her mind or at least not for public consumption.
Her emerging 2018 strategy, according to more than a dozen friends and advisers familiar with her plans, is to leverage the star power she retains in some Democratic circles on behalf of select candidates while remaining sufficiently below the radar to avoid becoming a useful target for Republicans seeking to rile up their base.
She has a strategy but only for 2018. Of course she is not even thinking of 2020. Wink! Wink!
“She’s not going to be up front,” said Jaime Harrison, a former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party and an associate chairman of the Democratic National Committee....
Within her orbit, there is an emphasis on Clinton moving cautiously rather than making headlines with a flurry of interviews and endorsements, as former vice president Joseph R. Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and others with White House ambitions are doing at this stage.
Not being up front seems to be her guiding philosophy of life and it works well for a 2018 campaign that is really about a 2020 campaign.
A Clinton 2020 campaign has been ruled out, although Trump continues to tweet excitedly about the prospect and mentioned her during a January news conference with the prime minister of Norway.
Yes, a Clinton 2020 campaign has absolutely been ruled out...officially.
As Clinton plans for the midterms, she is relying on some of the same advisers who have been by her side for years.
She plans for the midterms but Costa and the rest of us know what she is really planning for since she will have her same campaign advisers by her side again. We got the message, Robert.
Clinton’s primary political vehicle is a nonprofit organization and affiliated super PAC called Onward Together, which she created last year and which directs resources to groups aimed at boosting Democratic candidates and turnout.
Even that enterprise is understated. Its website does not feature her picture. Instead, it lists one of her quotes — “Resist, insist, persist, enlist” — and invites visitors to get involved in upstart groups she supports, such as Indivisible and Run for Something.
It sounds like Onward Together is like a political speakeasy. You knock on the door and a small window slides open. To gain entry you have to whisper the secret password: "Hillary 2020."
Federal election filings show that Clinton’s Hillary for America political committee transferred $800,000 in May to Onward Together. A person close to the group called it an “incubator” and said it has given out more than $1 million over the past year.
Will that "incubator" lay its egg in 2020?
Clinton friends expect that she will be an influential figure in 2020 — as a potential kingmaker, or queen maker, in the Democratic presidential scramble.
And it should be obvious from reading this article who she wants to make a queen. Thanks for the many unsubtle hints, Mr. Costa. In the meantime, let's just play along and pretend she is only interested in the 2018 midterm elections.
