Hillary enters the race -- here's why she will win.

Hillary Rodham Clinton has formally entered the race for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.



No big surprise here in this long-anticipated announcement.   News coming out about the campaign team she has assembled is encouraging, suggesting she has learned from the mistakes of her 2008 campaign.

And her theme is good:   focusing on strengthening the middle class and equal economic opportunity.  Jonathan Chait, writing in New York magazine, explains why Hillary is probably going to win.   He discusses demographics, Clinton's popularity, Obama's increasing popularity, and assuming no economic recession before the election.   Then he sums it up this way:

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.

Without disagreeing on any of Chait's points, I would just add one that I think is important:   It depends on how Hillary presents herself personally during the campaign.   There is the warm, outgoing, funny Hillary that is present and engaged in small groups and one-on-one encounters;  and there is the stiff, defensive, evasive, and distant Hillary that emerges when she is speaking into a microphone -- which can make her appear haughty and unengaged.  

I believe the first Hillary is the real one, and if she can allow that Hillary to emerge and engage the public, she will win big time.   And she will be a very good president.

Ralph