Hillary to Announce Sunday

Alternate headline: Elderly, Aloof Career Politician Downplaying Next Career Plans. Or as Moe Lane writes:

This will set the tone for the Clinton candidacy: “A person familiar with the Clinton team’s plans confirmed that she will make the initial announcement [that she’s running for President] in a video on Sunday before heading to Iowa.”  Basically, the Clinton campaign has decided to do the bare minimum necessary to signal that she’s running for office, while at the same time giving the press the same mushroom treatment that Barack Obama pioneered.  No questions taken, no opportunities to see how the woman reacts under pressure*, and this may be the first time in history that a major political candidate deliberately attempts to avoid media coverage of her campaign rollout: Ed Morrissey argues here that Hillary wants the media to stay focused on Marco Rubio’s campaign announcement Monday, and not raise inconvenient questions about hers**.

Regarding the comments on Hillary hoping(!) to be bigfooted by Rubio’s announcement, Ed M. adds:

Why announce on a weekend (assuming that Hunter Walker got this right) when most people aren’t paying attention to the news? For most candidates, an announcement allows a candidate to draw lots of attention to themselves, but that may be a bug rather than a feature for Hillary. At the end of Walker’s article, another source laughs that Marco Rubio’s rollout on Monday will get trumped by Hillary’s announcement over the weekend, but that doesn’t make any sense at all. After all, the idea would be to cut off the press interest of an announcement short by scheduling yours immediately afterward, not before. Team Hillary may be hoping that the press will only have a short window before chasing the next 2016 squirrel in Rubio’s candidacy, pushing the media to apply scrutiny to the Republican rather than herself. In that sense, Sunday works even better for Hillary than Saturday.

Moe likens Hillary’s strategy to “Max Headroom’s stillborn 1988 Presidential campaign,” but you could also compare such a cold and aloof announcement to Orwell’s fascistic, sclerotic, Stalinist Big Brother dictating orders for the masses to blindly follow. Sorry if that sounds cynical, but hey, I didn’t invent the analogy — Barack Obama and/or his surrogates did — immediately after Hillary’s first presidential announcement:

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And speaking of Obama and Hillary, the tension between the two camps, and Hillary trying to thread the needle between trying to appeal to the sitting president’s dwindling diehard supporters and to a happier, earlier (and not coincidentally, more conservative) time should be fascinating to watch.

Ask President McCain how such an election strategy played out.