Three years before the vote, Hillary Clinton machine gears up

Photo credit: AFP

Washington:  With the news that America's largest liberal fundraising group is to back a Hillary Clinton presidential bid in 2016, a growing sense of inevitability is building around her prospective candidacy.

The former secretary of state who once occupied the White House as first lady and narrowly lost the Democratic nomination in 2008, has been coy about whether she plans to run again.

But she has said that she will decide this year and, with a full 24 months before even the first party primaries, the "draft Clinton" movement is not waiting for its heroine to formally announce.

She swamps other potential Democratic contenders in the polls, including Vice President Joe Biden, another 2008 Democratic challenger defeated by Barack Obama's victorious campaign.

Meanwhile, the man once seen as her most dangerous Republican challenger, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, is battling a murky political dirty tricks scandal in his home state.

Clinton is scheduled to give three speeches in April before business groups in reliably Democratic California, further fueling speculation that the 66-year-old veteran is nurturing a candidacy.

Priorities USA Action, a non-profit political group which brought in $78 million for Obama's re-election campaign in 2012, confirmed Thursday it plans to raise money for Clinton from rich Democrats.

The group named 2012 Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, a veteran political operator with deep ties to wealthy donors, as its co-chair, essentially ensuring the most high-profile Democratic push of the coming election cycle.

He is joined at the helm by former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, an energetic Clinton backer and head of a grassroots political action committee, "Ready For Hillary."

Political analyst Tobe Berkovitz told AFP the moves are early efforts at "bigfooting potential challengers on the Democratic side and also freezing the big donors from going anywhere else."

Is it too early?

Part of the plan appears to be for the Clinton camp to burnish the inevitability of her candidacy, showing she is hungry to make history as the United States' first woman president.

But is it happening too early?

Berkovitz said news of the powerful groups aligning with Clinton was good for her but warned it may have been better to appear inevitable a year from now when voters are closer to making their decisions.

And yet the enormous early enthusiasm for Clinton is a "tremendous asset," argued Mitch Stewart, Obama's battleground states director in 2012, who now advises Ready For Hillary.

"I think you're seeing people coalesce around that excitement because it's very rare, if ever, to see something like that especially three years before the actual election," he told AFP.

"For us not to take advantage of both the enthusiasm that we're seeing across the country but also the time that we have, again I think it would be gross malpractice."

As if the world needed reminding that Clinton's gravitational pull was increasing, this week's New York Times Magazine cover features a much-debated "Planet Hillary," an orb bearing Clinton's face.

The image also contains a nod to potential threats to her campaign from the aura of scandal that still cloud memories of her husband's presidency, featuring as it does a "Friends of Bill" black hole.

If Clinton runs she will need to juggle operating in today's data-driven political climate of micro-targeting and rapid response, while also buttering up the old-school politicos who have been the power couple's inner circle for decades.

Sensing a juggernaut, Republicans have not waited for Clinton to declare before trying to set-up roadblocks.

Even before Clinton left office as secretary of state, conservative lawmakers seized on the militant attack on an under-protected US mission in Benghazi, Libya that killed the US ambassador in 2012 as evidence that Clinton is not White House material.

They have also turned to a recent memoir by former defense secretary Robert Gates, a Republican in Obama's first-term cabinet, who wrote that Clinton only opposed the 2007 troop surge in Iraq for political reasons because she was facing Obama in the primaries.

But when Gates was asked whether he felt Clinton would be a good president, he let down Clinton's critics in his own party.

"Actually, I think she would," Gates said. For NDTV Updates,

Hoax threats before games play on Sochi security fears

Budapest:  At least five European countries' Olympic committees and the United States received letters in Russian on Wednesday making a "terrorist threat" before the Sochi Games, but Olympic chiefs said they posed no danger.

Despite the assurances, the letters to committees in Italy, Hungary, Germany, Slovenia and Slovakia briefly caused alarm and underlined nervousness about security at the $50 billion event on which Russian President Vladimir Putin's legacy may depend.

The U.S. Olympic Committee later confirmed that it also received a letter by email.

Suicide bombers killed at least 34 people in a city in southern Russia last month, Islamist militants have threatened to attack the Winter Games and security forces are hunting a woman suspected of planning a suicide bombing and of being in Sochi already.

"I am very pleased to inform everyone that both the IOC and the Sochi organising committee ... declared after the analysis of the letter that this threat is not real," Zsigmond Nagy, director of international relations at the Hungarian Olympic Committee, told Reuters.

He said "this person has been sending all kinds of messages to many members of the Olympic family."

The letter, he said, threatened Hungarian nationals, competitors and officials, saying that "persons attending the Olympic Games might be blown up."

Nagy also quoted IOC officials saying the letters had been sent by someone living outside Russia who had carried out such hoaxes before, but did not identify the person. He said there was "nothing to worry about."

In addition to Hungary and the United States, Italy, Germany, Slovakia and Slovenia said their national committees also had received threats and all had passed them to police.

"We have received the email in question and we have forwarded the message to the appropriate authorities," U.S. Olympic Committee CEO Scott Blackmun told Reuters. "The safety and security of Team USA is our top priority."

The committee is working with the U.S. State Department, local organizers and law enforcement to protect the U.S. delegation and other Americans traveling to Sochi, he said.

Earlier on Wednesday, U.S. lawmaker Michael McCaul, chairman of the House of Representatives' Homeland Security Committee who recently toured Sochi, told CNN he had not heard of any threats against the U.S. Olympic team.

"Not to the U.S. Olympic team," he said from Moscow. "There are threats. I can't go specifically into these, but not to the American team."

The IOC, which is based in Switzerland, moved quickly to ease concern after the first of the letters was received in Budapest. It said it took security very seriously and passed on any credible information to the relevant security services.

"However, in this case it seems like the email sent to the Hungarian Olympic Committee contains no threat and appears to be a random message from a member of the public," it said.

RUSSIA ON HIGH ALERT

The IOC has said it is confident that the games, opening in Sochi on the shores of the Black Sea on February 7, will be safe, and Putin has put about 37,000 security personnel on combat alert in the Black Sea resort and increased security nationwide.

Russia also has been discussing its security operation with the United States, and Putin, who has played a big role in winning and organising the games, spoke about security at Sochi with U.S. President Barack Obama by telephone on Tuesday.

Even so, Moscow has failed to dampen concern that it will be able to guarantee visitors' and competitors' safety, despite the most elaborate security preparations for an Olympics.

A militant leader, Doku Umarov, has called for insurgents fighting for an Islamist state in Russia's North Caucasus to attack Sochi - which lies on the western edge of the Caucasus mountains where the insurgency is focused.

Security concerns were heightened by the suicide bombings last month in Volgograd, a southern Russian city that serves as a gateway to the North Caucasus, and by a video in which the Islamist militant group which claimed responsibility for the attacks threatened more violence.

In Sochi, which plans to host hundreds of thousands of visitors during the games, security forces are searching for a woman called Ruzanna Ibragimova, 23, who they suspect may be planning a suicide attack.

She may have arrived in the Olympic host city on January 11-12, a letter seen by Reuters said.

"(She) may be used as a terrorist-suicide bomber by (insurgency) leaders to organise terrorist acts during preparations for and during the 2014 Winter Olympics," read the letter, asking police to look immediately into the matter.

The letter from Russia's Federal Security Services to local police said she was the widow of a slain Islamist militant and is believed to have recently left her home in Dagestan, in the turbulent, mainly Muslim North Caucasus.

Photographs of Ibragimova show a woman in a hijab, wearing a long dress.

Some Russian media say Russian forces may also be looking for other would-be suicide bombers known as "Black Widows", but the reports have not been confirmed.