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What's bound to draw attention as the agreement's political ramifications come into focus: Clinton owns a piece of it. She helped the negotiations get started.

The Democratic presidential front-runner said President Barack Obama -- who tapped her as America's top diplomat in his first term in office -- called her late Monday night to tell her that negotiators had struck a deal: Iran will rein in its nuclear program and allow for close monitoring.

After a Tuesday morning meeting with House Democrats on Capitol Hill, Clinton tread carefully, saying she hadn't yet been brought up to date on the specifics of the agreement.

"Based on what I know now, and I will be being briefed as soon as I finish addressing you, this is an important step in putting the lid on Iran's nuclear program," she told reporters after that meeting.

After her comments and between Capitol Hill meetings on Tuesday, Clinton received that briefing. Secretary of State John Kerry, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and National Security Adviser Susan Rice briefed Clinton and other former secretaries of state and former national security advisers.

Clinton made reference to her role in the negotiations, saying she was "part of building the coalition that brought us to the point of this agreement."

Her top policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, sought to direct some credit toward his boss as well Tuesday morning at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, saying she was "centrally involved in the outset of all of this."

RELATED: Get up to speed on the Iran nuclear talks

Clinton explained her role in the negotiations in her memoir, "Hard Choices." She wrote that she began back-channel talks with Iran through the sultan of Oman, who had helped free American hikers imprisoned on espionage charges and suggested the nuclear talks.

She then had Sullivan, a top aide at the State Department, play a central role in getting the negotiations off the ground -- flying to Oman, meeting with Iranians and eventually leading to a September 2013 phone call in which Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani agreed to formally pursue the negotiations.

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Hillary Clinton's State Dept legacy is tied to Iran deal ...

During their 2008 battle for the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton argued bitterly about Iran. When Obama said he would meet with Irans leader without preconditions, Clinton called him reckless and naive. After Clinton threatened to destroy Tehran if it used nuclear weapons against Israel, Obama likened her to George W. Bush.

But now, Clinton and Obama are inextricably linked on the subject, thanks to the nuclear deal reached in Vienna on Tuesday. As her former rivals secretary of state, Clinton helped to launch the historic diplomacy with Iran. And, should she succeed him as president, its fate could depend on how committed Clinton is to making it work.

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Current and former administration officials say Clinton and Obama worked in harmony on Iran while she was his top diplomat. But they also consider Clinton more distrustful than Obama of a possible thaw in U.S.-Iranian relations. And they recall her as more willing to contemplate the possibility of conflict, pushing in Cabinet meetings for more detailed contingency planning in the event diplomacy failed. In one senior meeting, Clinton even encouraged a conversation about whether the U.S. should consider granting Israel approval to bomb Irans nuclear sites, according to two former administration officials, though she never actually endorsed that view.

In some recent remarks, Clinton has also hinted at a tougher view than the one that prevailed in Vienna, including her belief that Irans breakout period the time it would take to enrich enough uranium for a bomb should be longer than one year. Tuesdays agreement imposes a breakout time of only one year.

But Clinton has supported Obamas diplomacy, which she has tracked closely via regular briefings from Obama officials and the president himself, and in a Tuesday meeting with House Democrats she strongly endorsed the final deal.

On the campaign trail, she has highlighted her own hand in the deal. Im very proud of the role Ive played in building the coalition and the sanctions that brought Iran to the negotiating table, she said during a recent appearance in New Hampshire.

That doesnt mean the nuclear deal will be an easy political proposition for Clinton. The Republican National Committee, which casts it as a surrender to Irans Islamist government, refers to the Obama-Clinton nuclear talks, which it says Clinton secretly spearheaded.

The agreement could also complicate Clintons relationship with some Democrats, including wealthy Jewish donors, who consider the nuclear deal too accommodating of Iran and a grave threat to Israels security.

One former senior administration official said it was always unthinkable Clinton would oppose a deal: No way, he said. Clinton is too personally invested in the talks and could pay a high political price for abandoning the president.

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Hillary Clinton endorses nuclear deal - Michael Crowley ...

The New York Times gets some credit, I guess, for trying to divine how the conservative opposition plans to go after Hillary Clinton.

And the paper had cooperation from one such PAC, American Crossroads, founded by Karl Rove. The organization allowed a reporter to sit in on a focus group as different anti-Hillary lines of attack were tested.

But the headline sounded like the Times was offended: The Best Way to Vilify Hillary Clinton? GOP Spends Heavily to Test It.

Vilify?

As in, use bad-guy methods to blacken her reputation?

The dictionary definition says it means to defame, to slander, which kinda sorta implies that its unfair.

Do the mainstream media talk about Democrats vilifying Republicans? Or just attacking them, going negative against them, or holding them accountable?

The effort to vilify Mrs. Clinton, the paper intones, could ultimately cost several hundred million dollars, given the variety and volume of political organizations involved.

This is, well, standard operating procedure. Both sides spend a fortune conducting polls and focus groups and honing messages that will be most effective in tearing down the opposition candidate. Hillarys campaign will do it, and so will the liberal PACs that are supporting her.

Whats more, the Times knows full well that the liberals do the same thing: Republicans are acutely aware that early attacks labeling Mitt Romney as elitist were impossible for him to shake in 2012, and they view these next several months as critical in laying the groundwork to taint, and ultimately defeat, Mrs. Clinton.

Excerpt from:
'Vilifying' Hillary Clinton? New York Times wary of ...

By Donna Schaper with Rake Morgan and Frank Marafiote contributing. Edited by Frank Marafiote for the Internet.

(To read a PDF copy of the thesis, click here.)

With Hillary Clinton likely to pursue the Democratic nomination for president in 2016, questions about her intellectual and moral education abound. One of the major intellectual influences perhaps an emotional one was well was radical social philosopher and activist Saul Alinsky. As this story shows, Alinsky was both the ladder Hillary climbed to gain new perspectives on society specifically the poor and then, once there, a ladder she tossed aside when she no longer needed it.

Americans who graduated from high school in 1965 and college in 1969 were not just part of a population bubble the baby boomers but a cultural one as well. The children of the Sixties combined the typical young adult developmental cycle with a unique cycle in the life of this nation. They were not only trying to learn about dating, but also about foreign policy, ethics, and racism.

Hillary Clinton was quintessentially one of these people a Sixties person, although we would hardly have recognized her as such. That she didnt buy her wedding dress until the night before her wedding is not just a coincidence. It was also commonplace. Her generation was mixing private rites of passage with public ones, and it seemed right to do so. Hillary Clinton was a conformist to the extent that she mixed these personal and political levels early, at a time when most of the people did likewise.

As we search for social influences on the First Lady, we have to begin in this context, in the unique mix of the public and private that served as her environment as a young woman. She was as marked by her chronological age and the Age of Aquarius as most Sixties people were and she is probably where she is today because she was even more influenced by it than the rest of us.

It is no accident that she chose to write about Saul Alinsky for her senior thesis at Wellesley College . As a social activist, Alinsky was as much a part of the Sixties as was Kennedy and King. He was in the background creating the foreground of interpretation:

Power to the people is a phrase coined by him as much as by Stokeley Carmichael. Like the headband, Hillary abandoned much of what influenced her back then. But still this heavy identification with her age and THE age continued in bold form right after she completed her senior thesis.

That people stood to applaud Hillary Clintons commencement speech the first one given by a student at Wellesley is another mark of her generation that she wears in her psyche. It had to matter to her that the classes before 1960 remained in their seats, not quite sure of what had just happened. Classes before 1930 didnt even clap. From 60 on people were on their feet clapping.

This literal order of approval is important to our understanding of Hillary Clinton. And surely it is one of the reasons shes shifted from her Sixties image to a more up-to-date one. She learned early on that people interpret things by their age. No one needs the tag of the Sixties any more. Her repudiation of the tag is one of the reasons that Wellesley College , at her request, does not release her senior thesis to the public. She doesnt want to be identified with Alinsky or the Sixties any more than is absolutely necessary. Hillary is socially and personally based in the Sixties, not in its cultural but in its political dimension.

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senior thesis - Hillary Clinton Quarterly

Hillary Clinton is scheduled to give a major economic speech on Monday an attempt to articulate her position in relation to Main Street and Wall Street while also defining herself relative to her partys other declared presidential candidates.

As first lady, US Senator, and Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton had plenty of opportunities to observe if not work on economic policies and programs. As the 2016 presidential campaign unfolds, she has to keep in mind the popularity of positions articulated by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on the left and potential Republican opponents especially former Florida governor Jeb Bush on the right.

Many Democratic Party hands had a part in crafting Clintons speech, which is reported to focus on middle class incomes and wages.

To address income inequality, Clinton will call for raising the minimum wage, increasing taxes on the wealthy, boosting the power of unions, and reducing health-care costs, according to The Wall Street Journal. Shell also endorse corporate profit sharing, a college-affordability program, and a middle-class tax cut.

The speech is the product of scores of conversations with elite thinkers of the liberal policy establishment, such as former White House advisor Gene Sperling, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, liberal think tank president Neera Tanden, Princeton University economist Alan Blinder, and Jared Bernstein, former senior economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, The Hill newspaper reports.

Professor Blinder says Clinton has expressed interest in policies to curb excessive risk on Wall Street, such as a financial transactions tax on high-frequency trading, taxes on large Wall Street banks based on their risk profile, and eliminating the so-called carried interest loophole that allows managers of hedge funds and private equity firms to pay a lower tax rate than most individuals, according to the Associated Press.

"I'm pretty sure that as the details come out you and others will judge them to be more anti-Wall Street than pro-Wall Street," Blinder told the AP. "This is not going to look like an agenda that came out of a bunch of Wall Streeters."

In line with Clintons economic positions designed to appeal to working Americans, she just received a major labor union endorsement from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which represents more than 1.6 million members nationwide, including K-through-12 teachers and school personnel, higher education faculty and staff, early childhood educators, and retirees.

"In vision, in experience and in leadership, Hillary Clinton is the champion working families need in the White House," AFT President Randi Weingarten said in a statement Saturday.

Conservatives and Republican presidential candidates are pushing back against Clintons economic positions as she develops and articulates them.

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Hillary Clinton to lay out plans for the economy. GOP says ...