Brace yourselves: Hillary Clinton is running for president.
This isn’t big news. The rumors have been flying around for almost two full years, and Clinton has done little to quell them. She made it official this past Sunday in a video posted on her website, making her the only Democrat to officially announce her candidacy.
The other side of the aisle is in quite a different situation. The seemingly endless drove of Republican candidates will line up and face off against each other in what promises to be a very entertaining push for the Republican nomination.
Clinton is the clear frontrunner, and the rest of the field (whoever they turn out to be) isn’t even close. This could be the least contested Democratic nomination in a very long time, a stark contrast from the heated 2008 primaries when Barack Obama supplanted Clinton.
Raising money won’t be an issue; Clinton is set to rake in a lot of it. As Rick Hohlt, a Republican lobbyist and fundraiser said to the Wall Street Journal last year, “Clinton Inc. is going to be the most formidable fundraising operation for the Democrats in the history of the country. Period. Exclamation point.”
While placing a period before an exclamation point is simply bad grammar, Hohlt’s quote still rings true. The Clintons, Hillary and Bill, raised a healthy $1.4 billion in 2014. And at that point, she was only possibly running for president. And as it turns out, she is running, so she’ll need that money. That’s just how the game is played since the Citizens United decision in 2010.
Republicans will raise a ton of money too, so don’t feel too bad for them. But Clinton’s campaign is more than just another presidential bid or another Clinton in the White House.
Hillary Clinton could quite possibly become the first female president in the history of the United States, replacing the first black president.
That’s change. But it’s not the only thing that will change. If Clinton, or any female candidate for that matter wins the election, get ready for another, possibly negative change, too.
The Obama presidency brought with it an amount of criticism from the far right that hasn’t been seen before – the spawn of the Tea Party being the biggest example. President Obama has been called a “dictator” and a “king” by both the right and far right. His policies have been questioned and filibustered at an unprecedented rate, and Republicans in Congress made it very clear that from day one of the Obama presidency, their main goal was to work with him as little as possible and make his job harder.
This unprecedented criticism from the right is the materialization of an undercurrent of racism that came alive in the Republican Party as soon as John McCain conceded in 2008. The United States has seen a resurgence of racism, too, from police killing an ever-growing number of unarmed black men to the Republican led Supreme Court striking down the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
And if any of those Republican candidates concede to Hillary Clinton in 2016, that undercurrent will shift from racism to sexism.
It’s no secret; everybody knows about the GOP’s “war on women.” Republicans in Congress have been working hard to restrict women’s access to safe abortions and health care. Senate Republicans even unanimously voted against the Paycheck Fairness Act in 2014. A bill that aimed to close the wage gap between men and women did not receive a single Senate Republican vote.
That shift in rhetoric might be the biggest change brought about by the 2016 election. That and, you know, the whole first female president thing.
