Ready for Hillary PAC Overwhelmed With Donations Already
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Odds Taker
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Date: April 01, 2013 12:19PM
Enter the Ready for Hillary PAC, founded in January, ramping up its activities “in the next two weeks.” It’s a shadow campaign set up at least two years before Clinton will actually decide whether or not to run for president. It’ll raise money, sell merchandise, and build lists until the actual Clinton campaign bursts to life. And then it will change its name to “Ready PAC,” raise money, sell merchandise, and build lists, etc.
“I’ve always looked at Hillary as a brand,” says Parkhomenko, who at age 27 will be the executive director of Ready for Hillary PAC. “That’s been especially true in the last couple of years. It’s a brand I believe in. It’s a brand I want to protect. It’s a brand I want to build.”
There have been presidential draft campaigns long before they were caucuses or primaries or, obviously, PACs. But Clinton’s advantage is so deep and broad that the super PAC looks downright gaudy. By miles, she’s the most popular Democrat in America. In Iowa, whose anti–Iraq War caucus-goers hobbled her 2008 campaign, Clinton leads the field by at least 39 points. In New Hampshire she’s up by 50. In trial heats, in their own home states, she slaughters the strongest Republican candidates.
So Democratic donors are holding out for Hillary. Mother Jones reporter Andrew Kroll has coined a term—the Hillary Clinton Cash Freeze—for the glacier of big money that Andrew Cuomo or Martin O’Malley can’t crack. There is no new Obama, a star who can hack away at the Democratic coalition and take black voters and college kids and people who marched against the Iraq War. The 2016 Democratic nomination process might be the most boring since 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt waltzed into the convention.