Hillary Clinton’s campaign followed up the digital launch of her presidential bid with an outreach effort Sunday and Monday that is frustrating some supporters with its lack of concrete details. 
 
 As Clinton jumped into a van heading from her home in Chappaqua, New York, to Iowa for her first campaign stop — shortly after launching her campaign with a social media blitz aiming to portray her as a champion of everyday Americans — her aides held at least half a dozen conference calls with supporters, party operatives, former staffers and elected officials to distribute talking points and assure early-state activists that Clinton takes them seriously. 
 
 Story Continued Below 
 
 Those on the receiving end were hoping for more. 
 
 “I can’t believe I missed ‘Game of Thrones’ for this,” said one Democrat who sat through the call for former Clinton staffers at 9:30 p.m. EDT Sunday. 
 
 Some supporters said they were hoping to hear more specifics about campaign events or voter outreach strategies. A Monday morning call for reporters hosted by senior campaign officials was also scant on details. The aides revealed little more than that Clinton was “excited, energized and anxious” to get to the early-voting state of Iowa. 
 
 The feeling of an information vacuum extends to Clinton’s campaign website, which still does not list her policies or issue stances, and her schedule remains empty except for a handful of small events in Iowa. On her road trip — during which she is likely making many calls to major donors, said one veteran Clinton ally — she has no pre-planned stops. 
 
 For all the talk of a new, more open approach to campaigning, the first 24 hours of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign revealed a shrewd, disciplined operation reluctant to share key operational details with reporters, surrogates or Clinton’s own prospective donors. 
 
 The official tweet announcing Clinton’s candidacy came just before 3:30 p.m. Sunday, and by 4:15 p.m., national campaign surrogates were on a call organized by campaign communications chief Jennifer Palmieri. At 5 p.m., Democratic members of Congress had their own discussion with campaign chairman John Podesta, campaign manager Robby Mook and political director Amanda Renteria. 
 
 That conversation lasted less than 30 minutes and didn’t get far beyond making it clear that Clinton intended to work with the elected officials to win the nomination and presidency. 
 
 “It was just to let members of Congress know that the campaign is not taking a single vote for granted, and that she’s going to wage a robust campaign in every district, and she wanted to earn our support,” said Rep. Steve Israel of New York, who was happy to see the outreach. 
 
 “They just talked about [how] the first phase would be the ramp-up period and would be different from most other campaigns, and how it will focus on small events, direct conversations between Hillary and voters” added Israel, describing details that had already been made public. “And in May there will be a large event.” 
 
 A series of other conversations, including with congressional staffers and state party officials, followed, as the campaign sought to loop in countless Democrats who have felt left out of the Clinton orbit while the former secretary of state approached her announcement over the past two years. Listeners on some calls heard that all of Clinton’s regional political directors are in place and that her political team will be in Washington next week. 
 
 And while Clinton is working to promote a “small ball” image with her van ride through the Midwest, her top campaign aide and allies are set to schmooze with major liberal donors this week at the annual spring conference of the Democracy Alliance funders club in San Francisco, according to an agenda obtained by POLITICO. 
 
 Clinton herself turned down an invitation to speak, but she may record a video greeting to the club, whose donors have had a fraught relationship with Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and have pined for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren or another liberal alternative. 
 
 Podesta is slated to attend, while Clinton’s former policy director Neera Tanden and ally David Brock will speak on a dinner panel Wednesday. Brock, the founder of pro-Clinton groups Media Matters and American Bridge, was also scheduled to speak on a panel Monday about how rich liberals can combat the big spending of the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, whose donor network intends to spend nearly $900 million in the run-up to 2016. 
 
 Meanwhile, back at campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, Clinton’s finance team has been working the phones to pick up the major donors it will need to fund an enterprise that might cost more than $2 billion. 
 
 “I’ve already had a phone call from their office,” said Clinton supporter and prominent Democratic donor Peter Buttenwieser of Philadelphia. “If what you’re asking is, are they moving quickly, I think the answer is yes.” 
 
 Still, Buttenwieser said he has not yet heard much about the campaign’s specific plans. 
 
 “I think that will come in dribbles,” he said. 
 
 That tracks closely with the wooing of early-state activists who have yet to fully feel the love from Team Clinton. 
 
 After months of grousing about the lack of outreach from Clinton’s forces, several top New Hampshire officials said they received calls from the Clinton team on Sunday before the announcement, and Iowans also reported getting their first calls from campaign operatives. Activists in South Carolina, the third early-voting state, said they expected to hear from Clinton’s team soon. 
 
 Clinton staffers held separate calls for activists — including some who are not yet committed to Clinton — in the separate early states. A roughly 10-minute New Hampshire call, for example, featured Mook and Mike Vlacich, Clinton’s top aide in the state. 
 
 “They’re bending over backwards to be responsive and listening,” said Kurt Meyer, Iowa’s Tri-Counties Democratic Party chairman, who said he was told that the regional field director assigned to his area would soon be in touch with him. 
 
 But the “we care about you” approach has only gone so far, as Meyer said it was clear there were still kinks to be worked out in the Iowa organization. 
 
 He said the Clinton staffer who reached out to him told him, “One reason you’ll like [the regional field director] is that he’s from Wisconsin. That’s sort of like rural Iowa, isn’t it?” 
 
 Kenneth P. Vogel, Annie Karni, Marc Caputo, Jonathan Topaz and Ben Schreckinger contributed to this report. ||||| Former Sec. of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is greeted by local residents before working the grill at U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin's annual fundraising Steak Fry, Sunday, Sept. 14, 2014, in Indianola, Iowa. (Charlie Neibergall/AP) 
 
 Judging by her weekend appearance in Iowa, it looks as if Hillary Clinton is indeed running for president. Now she has to answer one simple question: Why? 
 
 “It is true, I am thinking about it,” she said Sunday at the final Harkin Steak Fry, an annual cholesterol-boosting fundraiser that Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who is retiring, has hosted for 37 years. Given the context, this was pretty close to an announcement of the Clinton 2016 campaign. 
 
 She was in Iowa, whose first-in-the-nation caucuses kick off presidential primary season. She was accompanied by her husband, Bill, who did his best to play the supporting role of a candidate’s spouse, although second fiddle is an instrument he has not quite mastered. She greeted the crowd by announcing, “Hello, Iowa, I’m baaaaack,” stretching the word for emphasis. 
 
 The last time she barnstormed through Iowa, it did not go well. The 2008 caucuses were supposed to ratify her status as the Democratic front-runner and show her challengers the futility of their puny efforts. Instead, she finished third, behind Barack Obama and John Edwards. The Clinton machine lost the air of inevitability that had been its greatest asset — and turned out to lack a compelling message that could compete with Obama’s promise of hope and change. 
 
 Now Clinton begins another campaign — perhaps — in which she is seen as the inevitable winner. She has said she will make a firm decision “probably after the first of the year.” But if she has reached the point of dropping broad hints, she needs to begin telling the nation how and why she proposes to lead. 
 
 The election of the first woman as president would be a great milestone, but a glance at the headlines — economic and social dislocation at home, terrorism and war abroad — suggests that voters will not likely be in the mood for symbolic gestures. To win the nomination, let alone the general election, Clinton will have to lay out her vision of the way forward. 
 
 Her memoir of the years she spent as secretary of state, “Hard Choices,” offers little guidance. My view is that Clinton did an excellent job as America’s chief diplomat, but if she has an overarching philosophy of foreign relations, she left it out of the book. We know that President Obama believes in multilateralism and the sparing use of U.S. military force. We know that some critics believe we should be more interventionist and others believe we should be more isolationist. “Hard Choices” doesn’t really tell us which way Clinton leans, though her record suggests a slight nod toward the hawkish side. 
 
 In the book, Clinton rejects the idea of choosing between the “hard power” of military might and the “soft power” of diplomacy, sanctions and foreign aid. Instead, she advocates “smart power,” which seems to mean “all of the above.” When I hear officials talking about “smart” this or “smart” that, I hear a buzzword that is often meant to obscure policy choices rather than illuminate them. 
 
 Clinton’s message on domestic affairs is also unclear. At the Iowa event, she sounded what is sure to be a major theme for both Democrats and Republicans in the coming campaign: the need to ease the plight of the beleaguered middle class. 
 
 “Today, you know so well, American families are working harder than ever, but maintaining a middle-class life feels like pushing a boulder uphill every single day,” she said, adding that “we can build a growing economy of shared prosperity.” 
 
 If this indicates she is beginning to formulate a populist appeal, she will find that territory already staked out by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — a non-candidate who nevertheless had sign-carrying supporters in the Iowa crowd. Warren’s blistering critique of structural economic inequality is popular with liberal Democrats, some of whom see Clinton as too cozy with Wall Street. 
 
 When Warren is asked about her intentions, her standard formulation is “I am not running for president,” using the present tense — which doesn’t definitively rule anything out. It seems likely, in any event, that someone will challenge Clinton from the left. 
 
 After Clinton’s brief speech, her husband tried his best not to steal the show. Bill Clinton tossed out lines that can only be called Clintonesque — “We have got to pull this country together to push this country forward” — and implored Democrats and Republicans to find ways to work together. 
 
 Centrist pragmatism as a campaign theme? In U.S. politics today, the middle is a dangerous place to be. 
 
 Read more from Eugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A. ||||| The 2016 election officially began with a tweet. 
 
 Shortly after midnight on Monday morning, Ted Cruz confirmed on Twitter that he will run for president, making him the first official candidate of the 2016 race and kicking off a season of campaign launches, with several other candidates expected to jump in in coming weeks. 
 
 Story Continued Below 
 
 “I’m running for President and I hope to earn your support!” the tweet read, with a link to a slickly-produced 30-second campaign video. 
 
 “It’s a time for truth,” Cruz says in the clip, which is paid for by “Cruz for President.” “A time to rise to the challenge, just as Americans have always done. I believe in America and her people, and I believe we can stand up and restore our promise. It’s going to take a new generation of courageous conservatives to help make America great again. And I’m ready to stand with you to lead the fight.” 
 
 A full announcement is scheduled for Monday morning around 10 A.M., two advisers confirmed, when the Texas Republican and his family are expected to unveil the campaign at Liberty University, a conservative Christian college in Lynchburg, Va. The Associated Press photographed the Cruz family’s walk-through on Sunday, complete with a spousal kiss on stage. 
 
 Cruz, a tea party-aligned Republican who was elected to the Senate in 2012, will become the first formally announced candidate of the presidential campaign. Over the next few weeks, nearly 10 months before the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, he will be joined by several other candidates — including Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky on the GOP side, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side — who are also expected to kick off their campaigns. 
 
 An early April launch allows them to take advantage of the full second fundraising quarter to rack up their cash figures as part of an attempt to project campaign strength after the June 30 filing deadline. 
 
 Cruz’s announcement comes with the Senate still in session. With a two-week recess scheduled to begin the following week and run through April 10, that window has created an incentive for candidates in federal office to formally announce. Cruz, by launching Monday, will get a head start on Paul, who is expected to announce in Louisville, Ky., on April 7, before embarking on a four-state tour the day after, with stops in New Hampshire, Charleston, S.C., Iowa City and Las Vegas. Paul’s campaign also confirmed a speech in Mount Pleasant, S.C., on the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier. 
 
 Rubio’s camp is also looking at the same time frame. 
 
 Clinton, the presumptive Democratic frontrunner, is preparing for an April launch while working to finalize a broad slate of hires for the expected Brooklyn campaign headquarters and in the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. 
 
 Her schedule contains no public events after this week, ratcheting up speculation that she will officially announce her bid around the beginning of next month. As Cruz rolls out his campaign, she will be in Washington at the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, for an event co-hosted by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union that’s designed to highlight her ties to organized labor. 
 
 Cruz, 44, will bypass the traditional exploratory phase of the campaign — reflecting a calculation that there’s little point in prolonging the process and that in being first out of the gate he can draw greater attention. The news of the announcement was first reported by the Houston Chronicle on Sunday. 
 
 By Sunday night, TedCruz.org was live as the senator’s presidential campaign site. The campaign failed to secure TedCruz.com, which features a pro-Obama message. 
 
 By starting early, Cruz, a grassroots favorite, could crowd out the half-a-dozen other potential candidates who will be playing for the most conservative segment of the GOP base. Those likely opponents, such as Ben Carson and Rick Santorum, aren’t planning to announce until later in the spring. Yet Cruz could also be opening himself up as a target to other potential rivals, some of whom already haven’t shied away from criticizing him. Likely candidates such as Santorum, Rick Perry and Lindsey Graham have all publicly jabbed him in the past, even before he was officially running. 
 
 Cruz is likely to face stiff headwinds in the Republican primary, with many of the party’s biggest donors throwing their support to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and many of the party’s conservative voters getting behind Paul and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. 
 
 His own colleagues in Washington have frequently been disdainful of Cruz since he helped instigate the 2013 government shutdown. And his hardline views and uncompromising style have disqualified him even in the eyes of more conservative elements of the political class who are concerned about electability. 
 
 Ted Cruz ad: 'Ted Cruz for President' 
 
 But Cruz is embracing that outsider status, just as he did in Texas, where in 2012 he beat out the presumed Republican Senate nominee, former Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, and became a hero to that conservative state’s tea party. He frequently compares the 2016 election dynamics to those of 1980 —the year Ronald Reagan was elected. 
 
 “In 1980, Washington, D.C., despised Ronald Reagan,” he said at the Texas GOP convention last summer, an implicit nod to his own standing, and a theme he has returned to as recently as at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year. “The only way we turn this country around is the American people.” 
 
 Cruz also relishes his reputation as an uncompromising conservative — in his campaign launch video, he refers to himself as a “courageous conservative.” In his view, the GOP has lost the last two presidential elections because the party has nominated candidates who are too moderate. 
 
 “If we nominate another candidate in that same mold, the same voters who stayed home in 2008 and 2012 will stay home in 2016, and Hillary Clinton is the next president,” he told POLITICO in December, after Jeb Bush announced he was considering a presidential bid. 
 
 In starting his campaign at Liberty University, a private Christian college founded in 1971 by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Cruz is signaling that he will aggressively seek out the support of the party’s socially conservative voters, a bloc with some degree of overlap with the tea party. 
 
 His father, Rafael Cruz, a pastor, spoke at Liberty in November 2013 about his experiences as a Cuban refugee and the need for Christians to be involved citizens. Ted Cruz himself spoke at Liberty in April 2014 about threats to religious liberty in America. The school’s newspaper reported Sunday that the university president, Jerry Falwell (the elder Falwell’s son) received a call from Cruz’s camp only last week about the event. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat who is close to the Clintons, was initially scheduled to speak on Monday, the report said, and he declined the offer to share a stage with Cruz or remain the only speaker and push Cruz’s event to the afternoon. 
 
 While Cruz will have some competition for the social conservative vote from potential candidates including Santorum and Mike Huckabee, he is well-positioned to compete in states like Iowa and South Carolina, where Christian conservatives are an influential bloc. The senator, who is comfortable using religious language, is slated to appear next month at the Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators’ “Homeschool Day at the Capitol” in Iowa. Later in the month he will be at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition’s spring kick-off in the Hawkeye State. 
 
 Aides said his announcement on Monday would highlight Cruz’s oratorical skills, one of his chief strengths. During his two years in the Senate, Cruz — a former Texas solicitor general who has argued nine times before the U.S. Supreme Court — became best known for his pre-shutdown, 21-hour speech on the Senate floor in September 2013 in which he spoke of the need to defund Obamacare. 
 
 He has long been building contact lists for his leadership PAC, the Jobs, Growth and Freedom Fund, often asking people attending his speeches to text words such as “growth” to a designated number, which gets them signed up. On Sunday night, a text from the PAC promised an “exciting announcement soon” and urged recipients to keep an an eye on Twitter. And with one 81-character missive, the presidential cycle was on. 
 
 Gabriel Debenedetti contributed to this report.
– When, where, how? A source close to Hillary Clinton's campaign tells the Guardian she will tell the world of her intention to run for president on Sunday at noon Eastern, on Twitter, while on her way from New York to Iowa. The Twitter announcement will be followed by a video and an email, says the source, and Iowa will be followed by visits to other early primary states. Clinton's rep wouldn't comment, but another source confirms to the Guardian that she'll soon be in Iowa. The New York Daily News also has a source saying Clinton will announce Sunday, and Reuters says "a variety of sources in the Clinton orbit" confirm an announcement is imminent, though none would pin it to Sunday. Clinton has been building up her operation and staff in Iowa while leasing space for what's thought to be her campaign headquarters in Brooklyn. Contender Rand Paul will be in Iowa today, along with former Democratic senator Jim Webb, who has launched a presidential exploratory committee. Ted Cruz, also an official presidential contender, was in the state yesterday. Marco Rubio is expected to announce his own presidential campaign Monday from Miami. Meanwhile, a recent Quinnipiac University poll that looks at Clinton's lead over potential big-name Republican contenders suggests her support is fading a bit, at least in Colorado and Iowa, but has grown in Virginia, the Washington Post reports.