Hillary Watch 2016: Tina Brown Endorses Clinton For President

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 Not a day goes by without national media outlets reporting on Hillary Clinton’s immediate future, while seeking definitive answers to the question–will she run for president in 2016?  The New Civil Rights Movement joins the “Hillary Watch” obsession

All of a sudden Hillary Clinton is everywhere this week.  And the national media is following and anticipating her every move.

Citizen Hillary emerges from a short respite since stepping down as Secretary of State in February to deliver two major speeches this week on “women,”  her raison d’etre.  Tonight she will appear at the annual Vital Voices Global Leadership Awards (an organization she helped found) in Washington, D.C. and again on Friday in New York City, where she will speak at the annual Women in the World Summit, organized by Tina Brown, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Beast/Newsweek.

As Chris Mathews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball said to Brown last night “you got the big “get” of the week” in booking Hillary to speak and Brown did not make waste of the moment. With little prodding from Mathews, Brown endorsed Clinton for president in 2016, who was appearing side-by-side with Howard Fineman, the editorial director at the Huffington Post.

Fineman jumped on the Clinton bandwagon too, calling Hillary’s  colossus global network of women leaders that she launched in 1995 from Beijing when she delivered an electrifying speech, uttering “women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights” to women around the world, just maybe what ultimately convinces Clinton to run in 2016 (before the segment was done, Fineman had already tweeted out Brown had endorsed Clinton for president).

But Brown began early yesterday, pumping “Hillary” news first thing, when she appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, by addressing one the most persistent questions among women’s rights advocates who supported Clinton’s “smart” power initiatives as Secretary of State, when she asked “will Hillary Clinton’s women and girls initiatives at the State Department agenda survive” (a Daily Beast article penned by journalist Kathleen Parker) as she transitions from government to an unknown future.

Ultimately, whatever Clinton ultimately decides to do, until she definitively announces she will run for president or not, the media is reporting her every move.

Last week alone, Atlantic Magazine, CNN, MSNBC (two shows), Bloomberg News, Buzzfeed,  The Hill, Politico.com, Roll Call and The New York Times published stories about Hillary Clinton, reporting on what she has been up to since she departed her State Department post in February.

While reporters sniff out what Hillary Clinton is up to, her supporters have been busy too. Indeed,  tonight, Clinton will be greeted by supporters, organized by a Hillary Super PAC, who will be staging near the Kennedy Center when she arrives for the evening affair.

 Hillary Super PACs have been sprouting up since January, among them, the most serious professional effort is evidenced in Ready for Hillary 2016 , spearheaded by Allida Black, a George Washington University professor, who is working about 30 hours a week and has been a Hillary supporter since the 2008 campaign.

Black  is eager to burnish the PAC’s credentials and recently announced its first donor was Ann Lewis, former communications director in the Clinton White House and that co-founder Adam Parkhomenko was an employee of HillPAC, Friends of Hillary and Clinton’s 2008 campaign. Ready for Hillary has also recently hired digital director Nickie Titus, who previously served as director of digital media for Sen. Tim Kaine’s successful campaign in Virginia, who had also worked at Blue State Digital. And the PAC has also hired Rising Tide Interactive, a digital consulting firm.

Overlooked by nearly everyone last week, was reporting by the intrepid Maggie Haberman, Politico.com and a New York  City based political journalist, who reported on Morning Joe late last week that she was now convinced Hillary Clinton is running in 2016.  According to Haberman, Hillary has a “transition team” assisting her in a return to “normal life;” “she is writing a book and there will be a book tour that will fold into a campaign launch. To date Haberman’s reporting was the most definitive evidence put forward by a national political reporter until Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times confirmed Haberman’s reporting with an A1 story (bottom of the fold) , leading with a donor angle, reporting all leading Democratic big donors were frozen in place, until she decides.

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But last week’s reporting began with long-time Clinton operative James Carville who told Luke Russert of MSNBC that there was a groundswell of support building for a Hillary Clinton run in 2016 and the “pressure will be “unimaginable” and that Democrats all over the country are excited by the prospect of the former first lady taking the plunge.”

“I think it’ll be unimaginable,” Carville said. “I mean, if — I just go around the country and if there’s a Democrat that does not want her to run, I have not met them. Now she is her own person and seems perfectly willing to resist that kind of pressure, but in terms of encouragement, I don’t think there’s ever been anybody that is a prohibitive front-runner for a party’s nomination as former Secretary of State Clinton is right now. You can feel it out there wherever I go and whenever people talk to me, it’s the same thing.”

No doubt Hillary kept her options open for running for president when she endorsed marriage equality for the the Human Rights Campaign in mid-March. Bill Clinton has been traveling the country backing Democratic candidates in primaries. Carville and Harold Ickes Jr. have said they will raise money for her.  She has about a half of dozen staff members on payroll that will be funded by her paid speeches–the first one is scheduled on April 24th.

How will Hillary handle the pressure and manage people’s expectations?  Stay tuned.  We are just getting started. It is almost a 1,000 days until the next “official” campaign begins.

Image courtesy of the Ready for Hillary PAC.

Tanya L. Domi is the Deputy Editor of the New Civil Rights Movement.  She is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and teaches human rights in East Central Europe and former Yugoslavia. Prior to teaching at Columbia, Domi was a nationally recognized LGBT civil rights activist who worked for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force during the campaign to lift the military ban in the early 1990s. Domi has also worked internationally in a dozen countries on issues related to democratic transitional development, including political and media development, human rights and gender issues. She is chair of the board of directors for GetEQUAL. Domi is currently writing a book about the emerging LGBT human rights movement in the Western Balkans.