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By Perry Bacon Jr.

In 2008, Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign famously asked Democratic voters who they trusted to answer the White House phone amid a crisis at 3 a.m. -- her bid to highlight experience over an untested challenger.

Now, as she campaigns around the country for Democratic candidates, Clinton is increasingly highlighting issues like child care, abortion rights and the role of women in society, potentially previewing a different kind of presidential run than in 2008.

Why are we one of only a few countries left in the world that dont provide paid family leave? she said at a rally earlier this month in Pennsylvania. Why is it women that still get paid less than men for doing the same work? she asked at event in Michigan a few days later. Then, campaigning in Colorado last week for Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Udall, who has been criticized for speaking about abortion rights too much in his campaign, Clinton gave a strong, unprompted defense of Udall, saying whens hes fighting for womens rights, he is fighting on the frontier of freedom.

Clintons shift, say both scholars and political operatives, is part of a larger movement in politics, as the importance of the female vote and womens issues have vaulted to the top of Americans political conversation over the last few years. And that heightened attention on gender, these experts say, will likely make it easier than in 2008 for Clinton or another female candidate to campaign on issues like child care and to combat criticism they face that might be rooted in sexism.

We never talk about John McCains cleavage, or what he does with his hair, or his wrinkles

Its a very different cultural environment. You have a rise in the prominence of figures like [New York Senator Kirstin] Gillibrand, a growth in feminist media, you have more people who are writing as feminists. This is a far friendlier environment to be talking about women-friendly social policy, said Rebecca Traister, a liberal writer who wrote a 2011 book called Big Girls Dont Cry that examined some of the challenges female politicians, including Clinton, have faced.

Not only has the number of female senators increased from 16 to 20 since 2008, but politicians such as Gillibrand have emerged as leaders in Washington, speaking frequently and frankly about gender and the challenges women face in American society. Issues of balancing work and family, which Clinton wrote about during the 1990s, were not a major feature of her last presidential campaign. Now, they're so prominent that male politicians in both parties are talking about them.

A group of unabashedly feminist and mostly liberal media figures like Traister are using both traditional publications and social media, which was in its infancy in 2008, to attack media coverage they view as sexist, a development that could help Clinton.

Demographics are shifting as well, as women are voting at higher percentages than men and unmarried women have become an increasingly key electoral bloc. With those unmarried women in mind, the Democratic Party, in 2012 and 2014, has put womens pay and abortion rights at the forefront of its policy agenda.

See original here:
Why Hillary Clinton Is Doubling Down on Women's Rights

One senior banker, who has long supported Mrs. Clinton, said: "The reality is that she might have to tack left a little for the party. What I don't know is whether she will stay there or double back."

Read MoreMark Cuban to GOP: Forget the social issues

Another banker said of her comment: "I doubt she meant that."

Ari Fleischer, a press secretary for President George W. Bush, took to Twitter: "Sometimes you have to wonder if Hillary really believes in anything, except appealing to whatever is current. Iraq war? Yes. Business? No."

While Mrs. Clinton has yet to declare that she is running for president in 2016, she is widely seen as the presumptive Democratic nominee, and an army of Wall Street bankers has been angling for roles in her campaign in hopes of clinching spots in her administration. (Another set of bankers is cozying up to Jeb Bush in hopes that he runs on the Republican ticket.)

A series of right-leaning blogs trumpeted Mrs. Clinton's comments over the weekend, seemingly as a way of highlighting the inconsistency in some of her positions.

What Mrs. Clinton's supporters within the business world want to know is whether she plans to govern the way her husband did as a moderate, center-left president or whether she will be pressed to take more so-called progressive stancescode for anti-business within the business worldas the Democratic Party, in the wake of the financial crisis, appears to have shifted leftward since Mr. Clinton left office.

Mr. Clinton, whose Clinton Global Initiative and other ties to business have made him appear friendlier to the financial world, found himself offending some of the Democratic base when he appeared to sympathize with corporations seeking to reincorporate overseas to lower their tax rates in so-called inversion deals. "Like it or not, this inversion, this is their money," he said.

On Monday at a campaign rally in New York, Mrs. Clinton said she had misspoken.

"I shorthanded this point the other day, so let me be absolutely clear about what I've been saying for a couple of decades," Mrs. Clinton said.

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Hillary Clinton, Street friend or foe?

"It doesn't seem to me that Wall Street is too focused on the comments that possible Democratic or Republican general election candidates are making at these local, midterm election events in places like Minnesota, Iowa or Massachusetts," he said.

"Thus, I certainly do not think anyone is extrapolating Secretary Clinton's or anyone else's remarks as her or his national agenda. We all know that the hotly debated topics of today will unlikely be the key ones a year from now."

Clinton's recent moves do not suggest any big policy shift. Warren recently softened her disavowals of a presidential run, increasing pressure on the former first lady to appeal to the Massachusetts senator's vocal constituency, which is desperate for further crackdowns on banks and more progressive tax policy.

Watch More: Rep. Portman's 2016 decision

What the moves do show is that Clinton is not great on the stump and is pretty bad at going left. These problems helped sink Clinton's campaign in 2008 when Obama caught fire with progressives with his soaring rhetoric and his consistent opposition to the Iraq War.

A 2016 campaign will be quite different, of course. There is no Barack Obama on the horizon. Even Warren, if she runs, would be very unlikely to defeat Clinton in the primaries, though she might get close or even win an early state or two.

But Clinton's deficiencies as a politician could prove far more damaging in a general election campaign, especially if Republicans nominate a candidate with broad national appeal who can compete in swing states like Ohio and Florida.

Right now it looks like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, should he get in, would be the most likely candidate to take advantage of a weak Clinton campaign. But even one of the other Republicans considering a run such as Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., or Marco Rubio, R-Fla., could wind up displaying superior political skills and denying Clinton the White House.

Read More Will all the midterm ad spending matter?

The main takeaway here is not that Clinton is going to run as a pitchfork-wielding, fire-breathing scourge of the banks. That's not going to happen. It's that she has to step up her campaign game in a major way to make it to the Oval Office.

Excerpt from:
Will Hillary Clinton tout anti-bank regulations?

"It doesn't seem to me that Wall Street is too focused on the comments that possible Democratic or Republican general election candidates are making at these local, midterm election events in places like Minnesota, Iowa or Massachusetts," he said.

"Thus, I certainly do not think anyone is extrapolating Secretary Clinton's or anyone else's remarks as her or his national agenda. We all know that the hotly debated topics of today will unlikely be the key ones a year from now."

Clinton's recent moves do not suggest any big policy shift. Warren recently softened her disavowals of a presidential run, increasing pressure on the former first lady to appeal to the Massachusetts senator's vocal constituency, which is desperate for further crackdowns on banks and more progressive tax policy.

Watch More: Rep. Portman's 2016 decision

What the moves do show is that Clinton is not great on the stump and is pretty bad at going left. These problems helped sink Clinton's campaign in 2008 when Obama caught fire with progressives with his soaring rhetoric and his consistent opposition to the Iraq War.

A 2016 campaign will be quite different, of course. There is no Barack Obama on the horizon. Even Warren, if she runs, would be very unlikely to defeat Clinton in the primaries, though she might get close or even win an early state or two.

But Clinton's deficiencies as a politician could prove far more damaging in a general election campaign, especially if Republicans nominate a candidate with broad national appeal who can compete in swing states like Ohio and Florida.

Right now it looks like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, should he get in, would be the most likely candidate to take advantage of a weak Clinton campaign. But even one of the other Republicans considering a run such as Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., or Marco Rubio, R-Fla., could wind up displaying superior political skills and denying Clinton the White House.

Read More Will all the midterm ad spending matter?

The main takeaway here is not that Clinton is going to run as a pitchfork-wielding, fire-breathing scourge of the banks. That's not going to happen. It's that she has to step up her campaign game in a major way to make it to the Oval Office.

See original here:
Wall St. eyes Hillary Clinton messages

Hillary Clinton on Monday mopped up her botched statement from a rally in Massachusetts last week, making it clear shed misspoken and hadnt intended to deliver a fresh economic policy message.

Clintons cleanup came as she campaigned with Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney in Somers, about 90 minutes north of New York City, after two days in which Republicans bandied the likely White House candidates Friday comment, made in the context of talking about trickle-down economics, on social media and the single sentence began gaining traction.

Dont let anybody tell you that corporations and businesses create jobs, Clinton had said at the rally in Boston, where she appeared on behalf of gubernatorial candidate Martha Coakley along with Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a populist, anti-Big Banks crusader who has become the wished-for candidate from some progressives for 2016.

(POLITICO's 2014 race ratings)

A Clinton aide later said the former secretary of state had meant to talk about tax breaks for corporations and businesses in that sentence, which led into a line about how trickle-down economics had failed spectacularly a sentiment she has long held. The overall context was clear that she had left words out of a sentence; the comment made little sense without it.

But some Democrats who back Clinton said privately she appeared to be trying too hard to capture the Warren rhetoric and adjust to the modern economic progressive language much in the way President Barack Obama did during a campaign rally in 2012, when, discussing businesses relationships to the infrastructure of cities, he said, You didnt build that.

And it highlighted a problem that has plagued Clinton in the past: overshooting in her language when she is outside her immediate comfort zone.

(Full 2014 election results)

In Somers on Monday, Clinton wrapped the discussion about trickle-down economics into one about the minimum wage, an issue Democrats across the country have discussed in stump speeches.

Trickle down economics has failed. I short-handed this point the other day, so let me be absolutely clear about what Ive been saying for a couple of decades, she said. Our economy grows when businesses and entrepreneurs create good-paying jobs here in America and workers and families are empowered to build from the bottom up and the middle out not when we hand out tax breaks for corporations that outsource jobs or stash their profits overseas.

Continued here:
Hillary Clinton clarifies jobs comment