Clinton joins 2008 race for president
WASHINGTON — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton made her long-anticipated entrance Saturday into the 2008 presidential race, aiming to make history as the first woman elected to the White House after an audacious and turbulent political journey from first lady to a New York Senate seat.
"I'm in," she said in a statement accompanying a video airing on her newly unveiled campaign website. "And I'm in to win."
Clinton, 59, long has been viewed by most Democratic insiders as the odds-on favorite to capture her party's presidential nod. But doubts have surrounded her prospects of winning the general election. And of late, her status in the nomination race has become more clouded, in part by the candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).
She sets out with strong advantages -- national name recognition, a command of the major issues, a crack campaign staff and a brimming war chest.
But she will also have to overcome her reputation for political calculation, an inconsistent stump presence and her intimate ties to the polarizing events of her husband's White House tenure, from the collapse of its healthcare initiative in 1994 to the 1998-99 impeachment crisis.
Clinton held back from a formal announcement of her candidacy, taking the preliminary step of forming an exploratory committee. But her campaign quickly kicked into overdrive; a mass e-mail soliciting donations was sent to her vast base of support, and aides made preparations for her to make appearances in the coming days in Iowa and New Hampshire, sites of the crucial early contests in the nominating process.
In her video clip and written statement, Clinton lost no time in confronting two of the major questions that loom as hurdles to her drive for the nomination -- how she will reckon with her early support for the war in Iraq and whether wary voters will look beyond the furors of her eight high-profile years as Bill Clinton's influential first lady.
"How do we bring the war in Iraq to the right end?" Clinton asked on the video.
Although she simply raised the question in her announcement, last week she waded more deeply into the intensifying debate over the war by proposing a cap on troop levels in Iraq. That suggestion was spurned by the Bush administration and questioned by some of her own party's antiwar activists as fainthearted.
Up against the GOP
- Poll Puts First Lady Atop Presidential Ballot May 04, 1998
- Building the First Female President Oct 26, 2005
- Mind the mogul Feb 23, 2007
