Hillary Clinton joins the race for president today. If you believe the leaks from her staff, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t, she’ll do it in a video released at noon as she herself flies high above the nation in a chartered plane. She and her top advisors, all smart people, must think it’s a good idea. It doesn’t feel like one. 
 
 For months Clinton has run a front-porch campaign -- if by porch you mean Boo Radley’s. Getting her outdoors is hard enough; when she does get out it’s often to give paid speeches to people who look just like her: educated, prosperous and privileged. Needing desperately to connect with the broader public, she opts for the virtual reality of a pre-taped video delivered via social media. Go figure. 
 
 Her leakers say she’ll head out on a listening tour like the one that kicked off her first Senate race. They say listening to real people talk about real stuff will make her seem more real. This too may be a good idea, but it made more sense when she was a rookie candidate seeking a lesser office in a state she barely knew. Running for president is different. So are the times. Voters are more desperate now, and in a far worse mood. If you invite their questions, you’d better have some answers. I’ll return to this point shortly. 
 
 Her leakers say she’ll avoid big events, rallies, stadiums, that sort of thing. This is about 2008, when she and her tone-deaf team seemed to be planning a coronation. This time they say she doesn’t want to come off as quite so presumptuous. Yet next week she keynotes a ‘Global Women’s Summit’ cohosted by Tina Brown and the New York Times, at which “world leaders, industry icons, movie stars and CEOs convene with artists, rebels, peacemakers and activists to tell their stories and share their plans of action.” Orchestra seats go for $300. 
 
 Clinton personifies the meritocracy that to an angry middle class looks increasingly like just another privileged caste. It’s the anger captured best by the old ‘Die Yuppie Scum’ posters and in case you haven’t noticed, it’s on the rise. Republicans love to paint Democrats as elitists. It’s how the first two Bushes took out Dukakis, Gore and Kerry -- and how Jeb plans to take out Hillary. When she says she and Bill were broke when they left the White House; when she sets her own email rules and says it was only for her own convenience; when she hangs out with the Davos, Wall Street or Hollywood crowds, she makes herself a more inviting target. 
 
 During its long ramp-up, Democrats searched for signs that this Clinton campaign would be better than the last, a seething cauldron of rivalries and resentments run by D.C. consultants who made their real livings from corporate clients. Things do look better at the top. The chief of staff is John Podesta, a man whose core competency is competency. Pollster Joel Benenson is a huge step up from the fiercely anti-populist Mark Penn. 
 
 Still, the leaks are a bad sign. All campaigns fall prey to them and it’s sometimes a good thing for the First Amendment that they do. All White House staffs leak to settle scores or advance agendas and careers. Bill Clinton’s White House added a new wrinkle -- leaks that elevated the leaker at Clinton’s expense. Often the leaker wanted only to prove his insider status and savvy; the result was to frame everything Clinton did as political even before he did it. Every modern president polled as much as Clinton but none was so scorned for it. Leakers had a lot to do with that. 
 
 All political reportage is full of insider tales about how every link of sausage is made. When House Democrats resumed their push for a minimum wage hike, staff framed the initiative not as sound policy but as clever politics. Even if authorized, nearly all such leaks harm the principle. On Friday, Clinton’s campaign let slip its aim to raise $2.5 billion; maybe that's not the best way to say hello to a struggling middle class. Someone gabbed about the message of Hillary’s planned sit downs with average families, a sure fire way to make the families look and feel like props -- and to make the whole, hollow exercise look and feel like a hollow exercise. 
 
 There are three problems that go far deeper than Hillary’s image or her campaign’s operations. Each is endemic to our current politics; all are so deeply connected as to be inseparable. You already know them. The first is how they raise their money. The second is how they craft their message. The third pertains to policy. 
 
 To get the money they think they need candidates who crook the knee to moneyed interests. They spend vast sums on polls, focus groups and data mining to find out what messages to send and to whom, and vaster sums to send them. The need to serve their donors keeps them from solving real problems. With so little to show for their service, they must rely even more on paid propaganda. The emptier their ads, the more of them they need. 
 
 The first thing to know about this system is how well it works for Republicans, most of whom would back the status quo with or without the money. Since they can’t afford to be too honest about policy anyway, consultants’ metaphors and themes suit them fine, as do the strict limitations of texts, tweets and ads. 
 
 The opposite is true for Democrats. When they truckle to the status quo, they break sacred vows. Their base feels most betrayed ,but everyone notices and no one likes what they see. Convinced by their consultants that politics is all about metaphors and emotion, they treat issues as landmines and do everything possible to avoid stepping on one. They skip real debates to pursue what Obama consigliere David Axelrod calls ‘the politics of biography.’ Trading real reform for public policy vaporware, they lose all sense of purpose -- and eventually stop making sense. 
 
 On Friday, Clinton’s campaign began the quick, quiet buildup to her Sunday announcement by placing a new epilogue to her last memoir in the Huffington Post. It’s mostly about how being a grandmother gives her new energy and insight. At the end of the piece she says it also inspires her to work hard so every child has as good a chance in life as her new granddaughter has. Her recent speeches, even those her leakers tout as campaign previews, say little more than that. 
 
 Barring a Jeremiah Wright-level crisis, a presidential candidate gets just two or three chances to make her case to a big audience. Her announcement is often her best shot. That Hillary passed on hers is unsettling. If she thinks she doesn’t have to make her case real soon she’s wrong. If she thinks she can get by on the sort of mush Democratic consultants push on clients she’s finished. On Thursday the Q poll released three surveys. In two states, she now trails Rand Paul. In all three a plurality or majority said she is ‘not honest or trustworthy.’ You can bet the leak about her $2.5 billion campaign will push those negatives up a notch. 
 
 Clinton seems as disconnected from the public mood now as she did in 2008. I think it’s a crisis. If she doesn’t right the ship it will be a disaster. In politics it’s always later than you think. Advisors who told her voters would forget the email scandals probably say this too will pass. If so, she should fire them. 
 
 Leaders as progressive as Howard Dean and Barney Frank urge Democrats to circle the wagons and spare the party the bloodshed of a real contest, but this party needs to get its blood moving. Clinton needs a real challenge and a real debate, not just a sparring partner; not some palooka to dance her around the ring for a couple of rounds, but a real fighter. She needs the debate. We all do. But who will bring it? 
 
 Underdogs always need to get an early start, so it’s surprising that Clinton beat all of her prospective primary opponents into the race. Some seem to be auditioning for the second spot on her ticket. Others may not make the race. If no champion emerges, progressives must mount their own debate and relearn some of the skills they applied so successfully back in the days before everybody had a PAC. 
 
 The Democrats' third problem is policy. They don’t really have clear policies to deal with our biggest problems. It’s why Hillary won’t have the answers those Iowa families seek and why so few Democrats do. It’s why we need a real debate. It is Clinton’s misfortune to find herself master of a dying system. 
 
 If she raises all that money it will ruin her. Fundraising nearly ruined her husband in 1996. He didn’t need all the money he raised then and God knows she doesn’t need all the money she wants to raise now. Even if raising the money doesn’t land her in hot water, if she spends it the way most Democrats do, that will ruin her. 
 
 Like Bill Clinton’s 1992 race, this election is about the economy. But this one’s about how to reform the economy, not just jumpstart it. Our political system isn’t set up to debate whether or not our economic system needs real reform. It will take a very different kind of politics, and leader, to spark that debate. We’ll soon know whether anyone is ready, willing and able to fight. 
 
 Bill Curry Bill Curry was White House counselor to President Clinton and a two-time Democratic nominee for governor of Connecticut. He is at work on a book on President Obama and the politics of populism. MORE FROM Bill Curry • FOLLOW BillCurryct Bill Curry was White House counselor to President Clinton and a two-time Democratic nominee for governor of Connecticut. He is at work on a book on President Obama and the politics of populism. 
 
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 Unless the economy goes into a recession over the next year and a half, Hillary Clinton is probably going to win the presidential election. The United States has polarized into stable voting blocs, and the Democratic bloc is a bit larger and growing at a faster rate. 
 
 Of course, not everybody who follows politics professionally believes this. Many pundits feel the Democrats’ advantage in presidential elections has disappeared, or never existed. “The 2016 campaign is starting on level ground,” argues David Brooks, echoing a similar analysis by John Judis. But the evidence for this is quite slim, and a closer look suggests instead that something serious would have to change in order to prevent a Clinton victory. Here are the basic reasons why Clinton should be considered a presumptive favorite: 
 
 1. The Emerging Democratic Majority is real. The major disagreement over whether there is an “Emerging Democratic Majority” — the thesis that argues that Democrats have built a presidential majority that could only be defeated under unfavorable conditions — centers on an interpretive disagreement over the 2014 elections. Proponents of this theory dismiss the midterm elections as a problem of districting and turnout; Democrats have trouble rousing their disproportionately young, poor supporters to the polls in a non-presidential year, and the tilted House and Senate map further compounded the GOP advantage. 
 
 Skeptics of the theory instead believe that the 2014 midterms were, as Judis put it, “not an isolated event but rather the latest manifestation of a resurgent Republican coalition.” Voters, they argue, are moving toward the Republican Party, and may continue to do so even during the next presidential election. 
 
 It has been difficult to mediate between the two theories, since the outcome at the polls supports the theory of both the proponents and the skeptics of the Emerging Democratic Majority theory equally well. 
 
 A Pew survey released this week gives us the best answer. Pew is the gold standard of political polling, using massive surveys, with high numbers of respondents and very low margins of error. Pew’s survey shows pretty clearly that there was not a major change in public opinion from the time of Obama’s reelection through the 2014 midterms: 
 
 Of course, Pew is not surveying actual voters. It’s surveying all adults. But that is the point. What changed between 2012 and 2014 was not public opinion, but who showed up to vote. 
 
 2. No, youngsters are not turning Republican. The Emerging Democratic Majority thesis places a lot of weight on cohort replacement: Republicans fare best with the oldest voters, and Democrats with the youngest, so every new election cycle incrementally tilts the electoral playing field toward the Democrats. 
 
 Skeptics have pushed back by claiming that the youngest voters — the ones entering their voting years since 2008 — are turning back toward the Republican Party. Their main evidence has been pollings of millennial voters by the Harvard Institute of Politics. Conservatives have given these results a great deal of attention — it suggests that the youngest voters, disillusioned by the Obama administration, have abandoned the liberal tendencies of their older brothers and sisters. But Harvard’s polling has not held up well; it predicted millennial voters would support a Republican Congress in 2014, which turned out to be extremely inaccurate. 
 
 Pew’s more recent survey combs through the data and throws more cold water on the “younger millennials” thesis. As Nate Cohn notices, younger millennials lean Democratic at nearly the same rate as older ones: 
 
 (Cohn does note that younger nonwhite millennials seem less Democratic than older nonwhite millennials, but young whites are far more Democratic than older ones, making the trade somewhat of a wash.) 
 
 3. Clinton isn’t that unpopular. A more recent line of thought has settled on Clinton’s limits as a candidate. It is probably true that she lacks Obama’s talents as a communicator and a campaign organizer. A recent Quinnipiac poll showing her struggling in Iowa and Colorado attracted wide media attention and seemed to confirm that the email scandal has tarnished Clinton’s national image. 
 
 It is true that Clinton has, inevitably, lost much of the popularity she won when she was serving as secretary of State and largely removed from partisan politics. Nonpartisan figures can attract broad support, while people engaged in political fights tend to revert toward the mean. Clinton’s support is, as it has been through most of her career, closely divided: 
 
 On the other hand, Republicans are much less popular. Jeb Bush, who is probably the best known of the Republican contenders, has much worse favorable ratings: 
 
 So there is little reason to think Clinton’s personal unpopularity will hold her back in a race against a Republican who is likely to have no more personal appeal, and possibly a lot less. 
 
 4. Obama is trending up. One major question looming over the next election is whether the public feels satisfied with the Democrats’ policy direction or wants to give Republicans a chance. Importantly, President Obama’s job approval ratings have recovered since the midterm elections, when his net approval stood at minus ten, to about minus three. His approval ratings on handling the economy have risen even more sharply. Approval of Obama’s economic job performance has actually reached parity with disapproval for the first time since 2009: 
 
 If the economy continues to expand between now and the 2016 election, Obama’s approval rating will probably rise a little higher. In the modern political world, strong popularity is not necessary to win; Obama won reelection with approval ratings below 50 percent. Voters make comparative choices, and all a candidate needs is to be superior to the alternative. But the economy is currently on a course, barring a slowdown, to leave the incumbent party in a stronger position. 
 
 5. Is it time for a change? The one remaining ground for Republican optimism is the possibility that voters will decide three straight presidential terms for the Democratic Party is too much. Many political scientists (such as Alan Abramowitz) believe this exhaustion factor is real; after a second term, voters grow increasingly restless with the in-party and are more likely to decide it’s time for a change. If this is true, Clinton may face headwinds even in an otherwise favorable landscape. 
 
 It may well be true. But there are reasons to doubt it. One reason is that models that detect voter impatience are based on a very small number of data points. Since World War II, there have been eight presidential elections in which the incumbent party has held office for two terms or more. It’s hard to draw definitive conclusions from such a limited number of events. 
 
 A second reason is that nearly all of those elections took place in a very different kind of party system. The 20th century was a time of loose-knit parties with a great deal of ideological overlap. There were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, which created large constituencies to swing back and forth. Democrats won more than 60 percent of the vote in the 1964 election, and then Republicans did the same eight years later. That made sense in a world where the two parties seemed to share a lot of common assumptions. Voters who supported Lyndon Johnson in 1964 weren’t crazy to switch to Richard Nixon in 1972; Nixon had established the Environmental Protection Agency and supported universal health care and a basic income. 
 
 The polarized electorate of today is a different place, and voters may not act the same way as they used to. There are fewer swing voters, and therefore conditions like a third straight term, or even a severe recession, may not budge as many of them from their normal partisan habits. We don’t know how deeply the partisan split has hardened into place; each party seems to be able to count on the support of at least 45 percent of the voters regardless of what is happening in the world. 
 
 6. There’s no alternative. All of the above brings us back to the central challenge facing Clinton. She cannot promise her supporters a dramatic change or new possibilities; she is personally too familiar, and the near certainty of at least one Republican-controlled chamber of Congress suggests continued legislative stalemate. Her worry is that ennui sets in among the base and yields a small electorate more like the kind that shows up at the midterms, which is an electorate Republicans can win. 
 
 The argument for Clinton in 2016 is that she is the candidate of the only major American political party not run by lunatics. There is only one choice for voters who want a president who accepts climate science and rejects voodoo economics, and whose domestic platform would not engineer the largest upward redistribution of resources in American history. Even if the relatively sober Jeb Bush wins the nomination, he will have to accommodate himself to his party’s barking-mad consensus. She is non-crazy America’s choice by default. And it is not necessarily an exciting choice, but it is an easy one, and a proposition behind which she will probably command a majority. ||||| WASHINGTON/NEW YORK Hillary Clinton will announce her second run for the presidency on Sunday, starting her campaign as the Democrats' best hope of fending off a crowded field of lesser-known Republican rivals and retaining the White House. 
 
 The overwhelming favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination, Clinton will nonetheless face multiple challenges as she returns to the campaign trail seven years after losing the nomination in 2008 to Barack Obama. 
 
 She has been a high-profile figure in American politics for more than two decades since her husband, Bill Clinton, won the presidency in 1992, and her fame still eclipses the other likely Democratic contenders and Republican opponents. 
 
 But with the fame comes a set of challenges Clinton will need to overcome in the coming months. She will try to get past a controversy over her use of personal email while secretary of state, and find a way to connect with ordinary Americans after her years as the top U.S. diplomat. 
 
 Her advisers, including her husband, have urged her to take nothing for granted, arguing voters would be repelled by anything that resembles a pre-ordained coronation. 
 
 A Democrat close to the Clinton camp told Reuters on Friday that Clinton, who is also a former U.S. senator, would announce her long-anticipated plans through video and social media. 
 
 After the announcement, she will travel to the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, said the source, who asked to remain unidentified. 
 
 A representative for Clinton declined to comment. 
 
 Clinton, 67, has sounded out potential campaign themes during public appearances, casting herself as both a love-filled new grandmother with a vested concern in the future and a wise former diplomat who understands how countries thrive and fail. 
 
 In contrast to her 2008 campaign, Clinton has shown signs she will not play down how being a woman distinguishes her from the 44 men who have served as U.S. president. 
 
 She has filled speeches with paeans to the moral and economic importance of gender equality and women's rights, arguing that economic growth, the health of the middle class and the stability of foreign peace treaties all hinge on reducing gender discrimination. 
 
 "Just think about all the hard-working families that depend on two incomes to make ends meet," Clinton said in a paid speech at a conference for women technology executives in California's Silicon Valley, citing her own experience of raising a young daughter while working as a partner at an Arkansas law firm in the 1980s. "When one is short-changed, the entire family suffers." 
 
 What this might mean in terms of policy proposals is vague, although Clinton said in the same speech she was "embarrassed" that the United States remained one of the few countries where there is no national right to paid family leave. 
 
 There are a dozen or so likely Republican contenders vying for the presidency, many still relatively unknown. Clinton has a different task: reassuring voters who already like her and wooing those who do not. 
 
 Only 2 percent of Americans say they have never heard of her, according to a Gallup poll last month, a level of name recognition exceeding that of Vice President Joe Biden, a name unknown to a 10th of Americans. 
 
 Her nearest likely rivals for the Democratic nomination, former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley and Jim Webb, the former U.S. senator from Virginia, struggle to get a fraction of Clinton's media coverage, favorable poll numbers and donations. 
 
 Clinton's use of social media to announce her White House run amounts to the adoption of tactics deployed by Obama in 2008 to raise large sums through small donations and appeal to young voters. 
 
 Also on Friday, Clinton released an update to her memoir, "Hard Choices," in which she described her final days as secretary of state and her feelings about her first grandchild. 
 
 CONTROVERSY AND CRITICISM 
 
 Clinton has been a target for Republican criticism since Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign. He promised voters then that they would get "two for one" by putting them both in the White House, but quickly dropped that claim when it proved unpopular. 
 
 Hillary Clinton's biggest initiative while her husband was president, national healthcare reform, fell apart without coming to a vote in Congress. 
 
 She became a figure of public fascination, and admiration in some quarters, for standing by her husband when allegations of his sexual infidelities first surfaced during his 1992 presidential campaign, and again in 1998 when his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky surfaced. 
 
 Both the Clintons have been investigated repeatedly by Republican lawmakers and the then United States Office of the Independent Counsel. 
 
 As Hillary Clinton prepared to start her campaign, she faced criticism from Republicans for using only a personal email account while secretary of state, and for the Clinton Foundation's reliance on donations and payments from foreign governments for its philanthropy work abroad, even as she served as the country's top diplomat. 
 
 Clinton has said she should have used a government email account as secretary of state while insisting that she had violated no rules. 
 
 During the campaign, Clinton will be expected to say whether she will more closely align with the centrist economic policies of her husband's administration or the populist policies championed by the progressive wing of her party. 
 
 Some Democrats have urged Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a leader of the party's liberal wing and a critic of Wall Street and big banks, to challenge her, but Warren has declined. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Lisa Lambert and Amanda Becker; Editing by Grant McCool and Leslie Adler)
– New York magazine doesn't beat around the bush: "Unless the economy goes into a recession over the next year and a half, Hillary Clinton is probably going to win the presidential election." But not everyone agrees. A sampling of what the pundits are saying: In New York, Jonathan Chait argues that "the United States has polarized into stable voting blocs, and the Democratic bloc is a bit larger and growing at a faster rate." That should put Clinton in the White House, though it's not guaranteed. "She cannot promise her supporters a dramatic change or new possibilities," Chait notes. "Her worry is that ennui sets in among the base and yields a small electorate more like the kind that shows up at the midterms, which is an electorate Republicans can win." But at Salon, a former aide for Bill Clinton is concerned about his wife's strategy so far. "Republicans love to paint Democrats as elitists. It’s how the first two Bushes took out Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry—and how Jeb plans to take out Hillary," Bill Curry writes. And Clinton isn't helping herself. "When she says she and Bill were broke when they left the White House; when she sets her own email rules and says it was only for her own convenience; when she hangs out with the Davos, Wall Street, or Hollywood crowds, she makes herself a more inviting target." Meanwhile, statistician Nate Silver acknowledges that Clinton is "very likely to become the Democratic nominee." As for the general election, he writes at FiveThirtyEight, it could go either way. Silver questions the so-called "Emerging Democratic Majority" that plays a role in Chait's thinking. Right now, Clinton's favorability ratings are "break-even," and she's "so well-known … that it’s almost as if voters are dispensing with all the formalities and evaluating her as they might when she’s on the ballot next November. About half of them would like to see her become president and about half of them wouldn’t. Get ready for an extremely competitive election." While the pundits debate, Clinton is heading out on the trail in a van named "Scooby."