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This was the week when Hillary Clintons highest aspiration, being president, collided with her deepest fear actually running for president.

Its not that Clinton craves a coronation, people close to her say, its just that she wants to forestall her leap into the sulfurous political lava as long as possible. The chaotic indignity of Tuesdays press conference on her use of a private email server as Secretary of State did nothing to change that opinion, or convince her to push up the campaign start date.

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The firestorm over the emails and earlier stories about the solicitation of foreign donations at the Clinton family charitable foundation have rattled the expanding crew of new operatives signing up for 2016 who havent experienced the maelstrom of a Clinton presidential campaign before. But the only two opinions that really count come from Hillary and Bill Clinton, and despite the carping of Democrats inside and outside their own circle they harbor few regrets about the way things have gone down so far.

Eighteen months ago who would imagined Hillary Clinton would have zero competition in the primaries? Thats pretty good, right? said one longtime Clinton insider, reflecting the prevailing view in the no-rush camp, which includes the Clintons and their longtime consigliore Cheryl Mills.

Everybody has an incentive to start this campaign the staff, the consultants who are working for nothing and want to get paid, you guys in the media everybody except Hillary Clinton, the person added. The goal here is to make this the shortest campaign possible. The emails thing didnt change that.

The danger, of course, is that the 20th Century political victors are ignoring 21st Century political reality and inviting the American body politic play by their idiosyncratic set of rules as they did by deciding to use Bill Clintons private server as a conduit for Hillary Clintons government correspondence. Moreover, as the press conference proved, its put her in the familiar and bizarre position of entering the 2016 campaign as both the strongest non-incumbent ever to seek the office and a wounded, vulnerable frontrunner.

Shell get past these sort of little dust-ups, but we really have to start having a conversation, says Iowa Democratic operative Tavis Hall, expressing the growing anxiousness of battleground Democrats eager for Clinton to hoist a flag to rally around.

The response to the emails controversy was hampered by the lack of a campaign team and the candidates reluctance to share details of her personal email server with the people who could defend her; Clintons people were rebuffed by surrogates who refused to appear on TV because they werent given details about the system, according to two potential surrogates interviewed by POLITICO. Moreover, it took eight days for Clinton to reluctantly agree to appear before the media and only then at the urging of her young campaign manager Robbie Mook and eminence-grise campaign chairman John Podesta.

Its clear they lack an apparatus. Shes a candidate without a campaign. Robert Gibbs, a former White House press secretary under President Obama told The Washington Post. And former Obama strategist David Axelrod told MSNBC he thought the campaigns sluggish response on the emails story was the result of a lack of answers from the Clinton campaign, or the nascent campaign.

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Hillary Clinton's fear of the trail