“I have never been afraid to stand up for what I believe in or to face down the Republican machine,” Mrs. Clinton said in announcing a presidential exploratory committee of her new “Hillary for President” Web site. “After nearly $70 million spent against my campaigns in New York and two landslide wins, I can say I know how Washington Republicans think, how they operate, and how to beat them.”
Six years after making history by winning a United States Senate seat as first lady, Mrs. Clinton has set her sights on breaking yet more political barriers in her extraordinary and controversial career.
Mrs. Clinton has become a major political figure in her own right: She is broadly popular with women, African-Americans, and other core groups in the Democratic Party, and she is one of the party’s best fund-raisers and most sought-after speakers. She is admired by many independents and Republicans in New York, winning re-election last year by a 30 percentage-point margin. While she is not associated with any major piece of legislation, she is widely regarded as an effective, thoughtful lawmaker who has built bipartisan ties.
Her early support for the Iraq war, however, and her unpopularity in the 1990s have stirred doubts among Democrats about whether she can win the presidency. And she remains an enigma and a caricature to many people: Radically liberal, coldly ambitious, or ethically compromised. Her friends say that she is none of these, but acknowledge that part of her challenge is letting voters see the full her and not simply a controlled, rehearsed politician no easy task for such a private and protective person.
HillaryClinton.com via TPM
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