Hillary Clinton For President, Take Two

Hillary Rodham Clinton (Wellesley College) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It must have been a slow news weekend.  All CNN and the Sunday morning news programs wanted to talk about was the forthcoming announcement about Hillary Clinton's presidential aspirations, and to speculate about how she would run her 2016 campaign.  That's what most of us were watching while waiting for the Masters TV coverage to start.

And there was Hillary, on a video release first shown on social media that looked like an insurance commercial.  The former First Lady, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State--the woman who's been in our lives since her husband Bill first campaigned for the White House--now wants to be the first person of her gender to serve as President of the United States.

This isn't Clinton's first trip down the campaign trail.  She was favored to take the Democratic nomination in 2008, until a guy named Barack Obama came along and beat her to it.

This time around, Clinton has a clear field for the Democratic nomination, with Obama's two terms in the White House almost up.  Thus far, she has yet to receive a challenge from someone in her own party, and that could be a problem prior to July 2016 in Philadelphia.

The Republicans have no shortage of challengers for Clinton.  Three U.S. Senators have announced their candidacies so far:  Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida.  They are (or were) Tea Party and Libertarian darlings until they decided they wanted to be President.  The GOP wants to prove that they really are an inclusive party, so long as their candidates don't stray from the conservative line.  At least not until a more mainstream candidate decides to jump in.

Unlike those other guys, we know plenty about Hillary Clinton:  The highs and lows of her husband's Presidency, Benghazi and those State Department e-mails that her enemies keep bringing up.  What we have yet to find out is what she wants for the country, and how she would govern it.  She can't just count on name recognition alone.

John Dickerson of CBS (who was just named host of "Face the Nation", replacing the retiring Bob Schieffer this summer) raised an important point on the April 13 "Evening News" broadcast, and it goes like this:  Since 1952, only one party has won three consecutive elections.  That was the Republicans with Ronald Reagan (twice) and George H.W. Bush (once) in the 1980s.  President Obama has won twice.  Will Hillary Clinton be third time lucky for the Democrats?  Or will voters decide to give whoever represents the GOP another chance?