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She's ahead in the polls but where does Clinton stand on climate change

Over the past year, she has toughened her rhetoric against climate science-denying Republicans and recently brought on former White House adviser John Podesta, architect of Obama's climate strategy, to run her campaign. Credit: United States Senate/Wikipedia

Early in Hillary Clinton's term as secretary of State, climate change expert Nigel Purvis approached her with a wonky request.

It was about using a particular slice of development aid to help communities in Indonesia stop cutting their forestsfilled with the kind of technical jargon that makes some political celebrities yawn. Purvis said he wasn't at all that sure Clintonwho at the time was grappling with a popular revolt in Libya, tensions in Sudan and the burgeoning brutality of Syria's Bashar Assadwould be familiar with this in-the-weeds issue, but she was.

"Most public officials at that level, when they are interacting with people that they're expecting to interact with, are very well-briefed by their staff and able to draw on facts and talking points to say the right things," said Purvis, who served as a climate change negotiator in Bill Clinton's administration and now leads a consulting company.

"What was impressive to me about that experience was that I caught her out in the middle of the country, at a time when she wasn't speaking about climate change and wasn't expecting climate change issues," he said. "She showed a real grasp of not just the problem at the high level but the very concrete solutions the State Department was pursuing."

Clinton, who officially launched her second presidential campaign in a video released yesterday, never developed a reputation for holding climate change dear to her heart like Secretary of State John Kerry, who has championed the issue since the early 1990s. Yet supporters of a 2016 Clinton presidency point out that she campaigned on major energy goals, including dramatically reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by midcentury.

As secretary of State, she appointed Todd Stern as America's first-ever special envoy in charge of climate change, pointedly bringing him along on her first trip to Beijing where they made energy a top focus. And when negotiations at the 2009 U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, hit their lowest point, Clinton swooped in with a game-changing pledge to mobilize $100 billion annually in global climate aid by 2020 that helped bring about a voluntary global agreement.

Over the past year, she has toughened her rhetoric against climate science-denying Republicans and recently brought on former White House adviser John Podesta, architect of Obama's climate strategy, to run her campaign.

Some greens are skeptical But that might not be enough for the green base of voters who might view Clinton with a dose of skepticism for taking a neutral stand on the Keystone XL pipeline. They argue that with Republicans sharpening their knives against President Obama's power plant emissions cuts, the United States needs a president who can be counted on to defend and advance U.S. climate policy.

Originally posted here:
Hillary Clinton May Take Strong Stance on Global Warming

It is said that the 2016 race to become the next President of the United States is Hillary Clintons to lose. And just as it was in 2008 during the primaries, she may end up doing just that.

If that were the outcome, quite a few Democrats would be shocked. Much in the spirit of Obamas election, they feel that having a woman as president is the next box to be checked in U.S. history. In that endeavor and hope, they are helped by the fact that the electoral odds in Presidential races tend to favor Democrats.

It is certainly an anomaly that the very country that led the global march for equal rights for women in the 1970s still has not had a woman as head of state or of government. That puts the United States in a league with the likes of China and Russia, two very paternalistic nations and solidly behind nations such as Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh, not to mention Germany, the UK and France.

Unperturbed, Republicans are getting ready, guns blazing. Their Stop Hillary campaign aims at reawakening old fears. But they must also guard against coming across as patronizing, if not misogynistic, which is a real danger for them. While they proclaim to stay away from her gender and age, one can rest assured that this will be at the center of their whispering campaign.

Image makers will play a key role. A big effort will get underway to turn every wrinkle in every close-up shot of Clintons face into an extra doubt about her getting to the White House. Digital cameras and HDTV are not Clintons ally.

To overcome the woman issue once and for all, Hillary Clinton decided after the 2008 race to serve as U.S. Secretary of State. However, her service in that post did nothing to allay the concerns of doubters. Clinton haters keep hating her and, via Benghazi and the reset with Russia, find further cannon fodder in her time at Foggy Bottom.

She is certainly a divisive figure. Described by some as a proven militarist and corporatist (as Ralph Nader has characterized her, professing his puzzlement over how she could possibly become the Democrats presidential candidate), Republican operatives like to cast her as part of a liberal-progressive cabal.

If nothing else, this underscores how deeply divided U.S. society really is. And how confused or careless people are about throwing around political labels.

Despite all that, Hillary Clinton is widely described as well prepared for the job and she may very well be. Still, the list of doubtful questions is long indeed:

How much in tune with the American people can a candidate be who has lived in a bubble of deference and behind a very strict U.S. Secret Service curtain at least since early 1991 a full quarter century by the time of the election?

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Hillary Clintons Arduous Road to the White House in 2016

This article originally appeared on Slate.

People's Champion. That's Hillary Clinton's first crack at explaining why she's running for president. (What she once called "the hard question.") The campaign video she released announcing her candidacy on Sunday was all about the people--expectant parents, job seekers, a same-sex couple on the verge of marriage, and women of all ages and ethnicities. This was a celebration of what National Journal's Ron Brownstein called the "coalition of the ascendant"--the young people, minorities, and college-educated whites--especially women--who helped give Barack Obama his two victories and who Democrats think are the key to a string of future presidential victories. It was such a play to this group that Business Week's Josh Green said the ad should have ended with a tag line that read "Ron Brownstein is responsible for the content of this message."

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Former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made it official on Sunday that she is running for president in 2016 in a 2-minute video...

The online spot was a departure from the recent vintage of announcement videos where the candidate is hard to distinguish from an action hero, ready to solve America's problems: foreign, domestic, and extra-terrestrial.

The Clinton video--which is the opening argument of her campaign--did exclude some people. She makes it clear that she is not running for all the people. As she wrote on Twitter, "Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion." She is not promising to be the champion of "every American" but rather "everyday Americans." In that grammatical choice lies the campaign: a fight for the people who have been left out of the economic recovery.

In order to put the voters center stage, Clinton doesn't appear until more than 90 seconds into the video. By then, all the voters she hopes to stitch into her coalition have seen a version of themselves. In the most recent CBS poll, Clinton gets low marks for honesty--only 42 percent of the country thinks she is honest and trustworthy--and her favorability is low (only 26 percent have a favorable opinion of her). For the viewers who have these chilly views of her, this opening gambit was a warmth-graft, associating her candidacy with superbly shot images of attractive, striving Americans. It was the visual equivalent of motherhood and apple pie wrapped in the American dream.

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Face The Nation host Bob Schieffer, CBS News congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes, and CBS News political director John Dickerson join CBSN...

Connecting Clinton with people plays to her strengths. A strong majority (56 percent) believes that she cares about people like them.

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Hillary Clinton's opening campaign pitch

DES MOINES On the surface, Hillary Rodham Clinton is starting her presidential run small. Shes being driven halfway across the country in what shes dubbed her Scooby Doo van, getting out at diners and gas stations to chat with people. She plans an intimate listening tour with everyday Americans, beginning Tuesday in the town of Monticello, Iowa.

Behind the scenes, however, the vast network Hillary and Bill Clinton have cultivated over four decades in politics is whirring back to life to build a behemoth ready to last far beyond the Democratic primaries. It will be the largest operation ever mustered by the Clintons, designed to compete in what is expected to be the most expensive presidential election in U.S. history.

Theres going to be a juggernaut, said John Morgan, a Clinton supporter and fundraiser in Florida. This is straight to the World Series no spring training, no regular league play, no wild card games.

Already, an overwhelming amount of money has come in via the campaign Web site, according to a person familiar with the online response.

Still, the Clinton team says their mantra is: Take nothing for granted. Her campaign advisers say they anticipate a competitive Democratic nominating contest and that she will fight to earn every vote especially here in Iowa, whose quadrennial first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses have humbled many front-runners, including Clinton in 2008.

Yet most Democrats see Clinton, in the absence of a strong challenger, as their inevitable nominee. So it was that on Day One, Clintons campaign and its allies turned to building up an infrastructure for what promises to be a long, costly and bruising journey to the White House.

The nascent Clinton team is laboring to assemble a grass-roots political organization on the ground in all 50 states by next month, when she will formally kick off her campaign with her first rally and major speech.

Clintons activity and footprint will be particularly robust in Iowa, also a general election swing state. Aides said she plans to help rebuild the beleaguered Democratic Party here, including recruiting candidates to run for local offices like school board and growing a corps of volunteers to help in the general election.

Campaign officials asked governors, senators and other elected officials to not simply issue endorsements many did so immediately but to send e-mails and other messages that could mobilize their own volunteers and constituents behind Clintons candidacy. In a Sunday memo, the campaign composed suggested tweets for elected officials to send, sharing her announcement video and inviting them to sign up with her campaign.

Campaign chairman John Podesta and finance director Dennis Cheng began to activate Clintons donor network with e-mails Sunday, followed by calls from regional fundraisers to bundlers across the country. Each was given an individual fundraising goal.

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Hillary Clinton starts small in Iowa as her vast national network whirs to life

MSNBC Hillary Clinton #39;s Favorability Is The Lowest Since 2008
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