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The former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state is expected to make her 2016 effort official Sunday with an online video followed by small events with residents of early-voting states over the days ahead. The campaign's opening strategy was described ahead of the announcement by two senior advisers who requested anonymity to discuss her plans.

If Clinton's strategy sounds familiar, it might be because President Barack Obama framed the choice for voters in 2012 as between Democrats focused on the middle class and Republicans wanting to protect the wealthy and return to policies that led to the Great Recession.

Clinton intends to sell herself as being able to work with Congress, businesses and world leaders, the advisers said Saturday. That approach could be perceived as a critique of Obama, who has largely been unable to fulfill his pledge to end Washington's intense partisanship and found much of his presidency stymied by gridlock with Congress.

In New York on Saturday, at the final event put on by "Ready for Hillary," a group not connected with her campaign that's worked for the past few years to stoke excitement for it, enthusiastic supporters joined elected officials and local party leaders to celebrate the launch to come.

"After she left the State Department she could have slipped into grandmother-hood, but people want to call her back into public service," said Jarret Berg, 29, a Democratic staffer in the New York legislature. "It's time for her."

As her official announcement loomed, the Republican National Committee linked Clinton to Obama, a regular focus of criticism from the GOP. "All Hillary Clinton is offering is a continuation of the same big government ideas that have grown Washington instead of the middle class," RNC spokesman Michael Short said in a statement Saturday. "That's why voters want fresh leadership and a new direction, not four more years of Obama's failed policies."

Clinton is not expected to roll out detailed policy positions in the first weeks of her campaign. Advisers said she planned to talk about ways families can increase take-home pay, the importance of expanding early childhood education and making higher education more affordable.

It's not yet clear whether that will include a noticeable break with Obama on economic policy. The GOP has hammered Obama's approach as anti-business and insufficient in the wake of the recession. The White House says the economy has improved significantly in recent years.

The unemployment rate fell to 5.5 percent in March, but manufacturing and new home construction slowed, cheaper gas has yet to ignite consumer spending and participation in the labor force remains sluggish.

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Hillary Clinton to announce presidential candidacy Sunday morning

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With an announcement on social media, she will pick up where she left off 7 years ago.

By Annie Karni

4/12/15 7:18 AM EDT

Updated 4/12/15 9:59 AM EDT

With much anticipation but little drama, Hillary Clinton is expected to officially announce Sunday she is running for president, a launch that will begin with a message on social media and continue over the next week with campaign visits to Iowa and New Hampshire.

The announcement marks an end to the first, awkward phase of Clintons roll-out a non-campaign that has frustrated Democrats who were anxious for her to turn the ignition switch on a campaign that the party is deeply invested in.

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For months Ive been getting calls from people who donate good money, asking when are we having an event, who are we writing a check to, said Jay Jacobs, a prominent New York Democrat, and a longtime Clinton friend and fundraiser. Its completely topsy-turvy. The groundswell has been percolating for so long. This thing had to get going, I cant imagine we could have waited much longer. I cant tell you how many phone calls I get with people chomping at the bit.

For the past year, the former secretary of state has been treated like a candidate while lacking the structure around her to support one. That has led to some rusty moments as Clinton has sometimes painfully re-entered public life, outside of the State Departments protective bubble.

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Hillary Clinton readies presidential launch

Hillary Rodham Clinton will officially announce shes a candidate for the presidency on Sunday, but shes been running in place for the better part of two years.

Clinton was only out of the State Department a few months in the late spring of 2013, a period shes often described as one of apolitical reflection, relaxation and recharging, when friends began fielding interesting phone calls from her D.C. mansion, known as Whitehaven. One person in Clintons orbit at the time recalls picking up the phone and hearing Hello! Its Hillary! followed by a barrage of detailed queries about the organizational health of state parties in two key presidential battleground states Florida (bad) and Ohio (much, much worse).

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Thats when I knew she was going to do it, said the person, who also recalled sitting through one Im-never-doing-this-again conversation with Clinton after the 2008 election. To me she was always basically a yes, and wanted people to make the case for no. But the case for yes was always stronger.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who served as national party chairman during Bill Clintons second term, had a similar experience this time the topic was African-American politics a couple of months later at the June 2013 funeral of longtime Philadelphia congressman Bill Gray.

She asked me a lot of questions about people who attended that would only have been relevant for someone who would make use of those connections in the future as a candidate for office, he said. It was a surprise to me that she had made up her mind so early.

Around the same time, Clinton joined Twitter, and made her intentions tantalizingly unclear, describing herself as Wife, mom, lawyer, women & kids advocate, FLOAR, FLOTUS, US Senator, SecState, author, dog owner, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling cracker, TBD

Even if most people around Clinton knew she would run, the candidate-to-be left that TBD deliberately open for months leaving herself latitude to ditch the entire enterprise if she got cold feet or faced a serious Democratic challenger. Its axiomatic to the point of clich to say that Clinton, the instant Democratic frontrunner, has wanted to be the first woman president since earliest girlhood in Chicago. The idea that she is unquenchably ambitious has embedded itself in the American consciousness, in part because she has been less artful about cloaking it in part because its true. In its 2016 Clinton kickoff skit, Saturday Night Live fabricated a 1940s sonogram of in-utero Hillary Rodham waving a campaign sign.

The truth is considerably more complicated. Clinton is dead-set on avoiding the mistakes of 08, and approved a series of secret reports studying the 2008 campaign in minute detail, friends and advisers say. But for all her calculation, shes been surprisingly noncommittal and reluctant to leave her comfortable double-mansion life for the grinding, grubby, lacerating realities of another campaign, fully exposed to the media horde she fears, loathes and fights.

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Hillary Clinton's slow walk to 'yes'

TIME Politics Hillary Clinton Brooks KraftCorbis Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton takes part in a Center for American Progress roundtable discussion on "Expanding Opportunities in America's Urban Areas" in Washington on March 23, 2015.

In February 2013, Hillary Clinton became a private citizen for the first time in two decades. The former First Lady, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State said she was retiring from public view to spend more time at home with Bill to watch stupid movies and laugh at our dogs. But her foray into private life was brief, and it wouldnt be long before Clinton returned to politics with the grandest of goals: to become president.

Today, as she launches her second campaign for the White House, Clinton has definitively re-entered public life. But her time off was far from a vacation. Instead, Clinton was busy honing her stump speech, developing a campaign platform and carefully laying the groundwork for a massive campaign operation.

Here are some of the things Clinton did during the last two years.

She distanced herself from President Obama

One of Clintons greatest difficulties as a former Secretary of State in the Obama administration will be to differentiate herself from the current president, even as she expresses support for some of his policies. In an interview last year with The Atlantic, Clinton did just that: The president, she said, didnt do enough to assist Syrian rebels early in the bloody conflict. The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad, Clinton said at the time, left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.

She publicly supported gay marriage

Support for gay marriage is now a central part of the Democratic platform, and the candidate who wins the nomination will have to have same-sex marriage credentials. Clinton announced her support for gay marriage in a six-minute video released in March 2013. LGBT Americans are our colleagues, our teachers, our soldiers, our friends, our loved ones, telling viewers that she supported marriage equality personally, and as a matter of policy and law.

Some questioned her tardiness, though: Clintons proclamation came nearly a year after President Obamas, and by 2013, support of gay marriage was a mainstream view. In a testy interview on NPR, interviewer Terry Gross pushed her on whether her views on gay marriage had evolved, or Clinton had concealed her true views for political reasons. You are playing with my words, Clinton said. I did not grow up even imagining gay marriage and I dont think you did either. As Secretary of State, however, Clinton would have been breaking a longstanding tradition of keeping mum on domestic policy if she had voiced support of gay marriage.

She offered qualified praise for Obamacare

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What Hillary Clinton Did Before Her Campaign

Hillary Clinton is all set to announce Sunday her candidacy for the American presidency in 2016, finally putting to rest speculation that the former U.S. secretary of state, senator and first lady would again make a run for the White House. Pursuing the presidency isnt all fun and games, however. It brings with it an extremely high level of public scrutiny and criticism. Clinton has seen her fair share of scandals in her 32 years in the political spotlight. Here are five of them.

1. Whitewater. Clintons earliest political scandal played out over two decades, from 1978 to 1998. It began when Bill and Hillary Clinton partnered with James and Susan McDougal to buy a 230-acre parcel of land in Arkansas Ozark Mountains for the development of vacation homes through the Whitewater Development Corp. A 1992 report by the New York Times on the demise of the venture launched investigations into the Clintons connections with James McDougals Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan business, which was being investigated by the Resolution Trust Corp. for its own failure.

Among other allegations, it was claimed that Bill Clinton used his position as Arkansas governor to pressure David Hale to lend $300,000 to Susan McDougal. Hillary Clintons work with the Rose Law Firm, which represented Madison Guaranty, implicated her in the scandal. A federal investigation eventually led to both Clintons being subpoenaed, making Hillary Clinton the only sitting U.S. first lady to ever appear before a grand jury. Both Clintons were cleared of wrongdoing. For an in-depth look at the Whitewater scandal, see the Washington Posts archive.

2. Benghazi. Clintons tenure as U.S. secretary of state under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013 was marred by the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Conservative pundits seized on the attack as evidence that the Obama administration in general and Clintons State Department in particular were incompetent and unable to protect the countrys interests abroad. Susan Rice, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and now the national security adviser, initially insisted the attack was spontaneous and grew out of local demonstrations, but once it became evident that the attack was the result of a coordinated terrorist action, pundits alleged a cover-up was in play.

Clinton ultimately took responsibility for the security failures in Benghazi, but the cover-up allegations remain unproven.

3. Her private email account. Clintons latest scandal also involves her time as secretary of state. The New York Times broke the story last month that Clinton employed a private email account for official business during her tenure at the State Department. According to the Times, this use could violate federal requirements centered on the status of those emails as public records. With Clinton a prime 2016 presidential candidate, a media firestorm erupted. Clinton hasnt been charged with breaking any laws, but that doesnt mean she didnt do anything wrong, critics say.

As a federal employee, Clinton had the right to delete any emails she deemed personal and therefore inappropriate as public records. After receiving a State Department request for her emails last October, Clinton deleted 30,000 of them and handed over another 30,000 as public records. She then wiped her personal server, meaning nobody could access the 30,000 emails she personally decided to keep off the public record, the New York Times reported.

4. The Clinton Foundations questionable finances. The Clinton Foundation, founded by Bill Clinton shortly after he left the White House in January 2001, has become a massive multimillion-dollar organization known for high-profile partnerships, events and initiatives. Much of the foundations funding comes from longtime backers of the Clinton family -- and, in some instances, foreign governments on which Hillary Clinton had to take policy stancesas secretary of state. One example: Despite lambasting Colombia for its human-rights record in 2008, her foreign-policy stance on the country became noticably more favorable in 2011 after a large contribution to the Clinton Foundation by the Pacific Rubiales Energy Corp., an oil and gas company active in Colombia and based in Toronto.

Recently, the Clinton Foundation accepted a donation from a Moroccan government-owned company, despite the Clinton-run State Departments 2011 criticism of that government, Politicoreported.

Where all that money winds up is also a subject of criticism. For one thing, there have been allegations of waste. Ira Magaziner, who runs multiple efforts at the foundation, spent thousands of dollars to send a team around the world for months to build up a climate-change proposal, but it fell flat, as the New York Timesreported.

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Hillary Clinton Scandals: Five Times She Caught Heat