According to Politico White House correspondent Mike Allen, Hillary Clinton is least appealing when she looks — as she undoubtedly will throughout her likely presidential campaign — “political.”
Allen said on CNN’s “Inside Politics” Sunday that the former secretary of State exhibits her “biggest vulnerability” when she looks like “just another candidate” vying for the presidency. He hypothesized that this weakness is the reason for which Clinton may ultimately delay her campaign until the summer.
“There’s a very strong argument for waiting, and if you look at the polling of both Republicans and Democrats and their focus groups, the biggest vulnerability for Secretary Clinton is when she looks political,” explained Allen. “People like her better when she’s the former secretary of State, when she’s in statesman mode.”
“As soon as she becomes just another candidate, people are reminded of the things they don’t like about her, don’t like about the Clintons,” he added.
While it has been rumored that Clinton will announce her presidential campaign sometime this spring, reports have now surfaced that many Clinton supporters are pressuring the former secretary of State to wait until the summer to make her bid for president official.
Allen later added that the one problem with Hillary deciding to wait is the risk that Americans will see her as taking the primary race for granted and expecting to win the Democratic nomination easily.
“The pushback to that and the reason that they may pull back from that is that the worst thing for her would be to look like she’s taking it for granted, look like she’s treating it as a coronation,” Allen said. “That’s of course what hurt her so badly before.”
A Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register Iowa poll out Sunday shows that Clinton is dominating the field of potential Democratic candidates in the state, indicating that at this point the former secretary of State is the liberal favorite.
That, of course, could change if Clinton announces her campaign and immediately appears “political,” which is bound to happen when she finally goes public with her campaign.
