Hillary Clinton is embracing her inner grandma.
After Republican 2016 hopefuls spent a day struggling to finesse the vaccination debate, the 67-year-old Clinton weighed in roughly an hour before midnight: The science is clear, she tweeted late Monday. The earth is round, the sky is blue, and #vaccineswork. Lets protect all our kids. #GrandmothersKnowBest.
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It was just 127 characters, but it struck a chord especially her new hashtag. By Tuesday evening the tweet had garnered roughly 24,000 retweets reaching millions of Twitter followers and making it her most-shared tweet since she jabbed Fox during February 2014s Super Bowl.
The Monday night tweet was just her sixth in 2015, but some of her backers felt it might shed new light on her candidacy.
The message offered a look at how Clinton might approach her likely 2016 campaign for the White House and how she might combat Republican attacks on her age.
While Clinton allies and detractors uniformly cautioned that too much of her strategy should not be inferred from a single late-night tweet, her backers also said the post demonstrated her intention to use her family specifically, her 4-month-old granddaughter, Charlotte as an important strand of her campaign message. It also hinted at how she intends to try to garner positive press and present herself as the adult in the room as the crowded Republican field dukes it out.
It does tap into something that is potentially really powerful for her in terms of how she connects, and how she communicates, said Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist and alum of President Bill Clintons White House. When she offers a theory of government and connects it to her biography, in particular being a mom and a grandma, and talking about intergenerational equity issues and the possibility to do right by your kids the combination there is a really, really powerful way to communicate.
Clinton first trotted out her granddaughter as a character in her 2014 stump speech while campaigning for Democrats across the country, using the infant Charlotte as a justification for her continued investment in the countrys future. The 4-month-old Charlotte has been featured in more than a dozen of Clintons public appearances, making her a staple.
When you have this little baby, you spend a lot of time just staring at her. You really resolve, as her parents and grandparents [to] do whatever we can to make sure she has the opportunities she deserves to have, Clinton said in New Hampshire in November.
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Hillary Clinton, grandma-in-chief