Subject: Hillary Clinton 2016: Aims to end Biden talk - POLITICO
From: "Eric Schwerin" <[email-masked]>
To: "Hunter Biden" <[email-masked]>, "Alexander S. Mackler" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 21:11:47 -0400

Hillary Clinton 2016: Aims to end Biden talk - POLITICO

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/08/hillary-clinton-aims-to-end-joe-biden-talk-121818.html#ixzz3k3yzN9tt

Hillary Clinton aims to end Joe Biden talk

CLEVELAND — Hillary Clinton’s team is getting tired of the Joe Biden talk.
And this week, they want to kill it.

The Democrat’s strategy heading into a meeting of party elite on Friday is
aimed at dismissing the idea now fueling Biden supporters that her campaign
is going off the rails, strategists, donors and political allies familiar
with Brooklyn’s thinking told POLITICO.

Story Continued Below

From a sprint through Iowa that deflected attention from the email saga to
her first stop in the swing state of Ohio and now the Democratic National
Committee cattle call in Minneapolis, Clinton’s operation knows it needs to
both flex its political muscles and prove it can keep its nose to the
grindstone to score a controversy-free week.

The workmanlike stretch is meant to convince Democratic power brokers and
big-money donors that they don’t need to place side bets on the vice
president — and to suggest to Biden himself that there’s no role for him
here; there’s no race to save.

The campaign is inviting its top fundraisers to Brooklyn headquarters for a
day of strategy sessions with top aides next week, and Clinton’s operation
told that group of “Hillblazers” that it would soon start getting regular
policy briefings via conference calls with one of Clinton’s closest policy
aides, Jake Sullivan.

Her team also has made a show of promoting an endorsement from Tom Vilsack
— an influential Iowan and a Cabinet member who served alongside both Biden
and Clinton. And the biggest pro-Clinton super PAC, Priorities USA Action,
unveiled its first ad of the cycle on Thursday.

“What they’re trying to manage now is the external narrative among
supporters and others; it’s a national hand-holding exercise,” said one
Democrat involved with Clinton’s fundraising and political planning.
“That’s probably been a little bit compounded or magnified because of the
external issues that are out there. The emails.

“But baseball’s a long season, and there are periods where you just have to
grind it out for a couple of weeks. Even for championship teams. This is a
grind week for the campaign.”

Indeed, Clinton’s rural policy rollout in Iowa on Wednesday was low-key,
scoring little national attention. And the Ohio stop also paled. But
Friday’s appearance at the DNC meeting is critical. It’s where she wants to
address the party’s hand-wringing about her campaign’s troubles, and end
Biden’s bid before it begins.

Biden won’t be there, having declined an invitation. But his name will be
on everyone’s lips in Minneapolis, especially after the latest Quinnipiac
poll showed the vice president faring better than Clinton against a handful
of Republicans, and with the highest favorability rating of any candidate.

With the trend lines on her trustworthiness on such a steep southward slope
that “liar” is the word voters most associate with her, according to the
same poll, the task of calming party establishment types is increasing in
urgency.

It won’t be easy to do, not least in the face of buzz about Biden.

“It’s not just about the Gowdy [Benghazi] Committee and the Republicans,
it’s also about the press. The problem is that as the State Department goes
through this process and releases more and more emails, every time, there’s
a story,” said longtime Democratic strategist Bob Shrum, who helped lead
the losing presidential campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry. “So I don’t
know what they can say that puts the story behind them. She obviously
believes she can survive this.”

Clinton’s response to speculation about Biden’s potential candidacy is both
sentimental and calculated. They have a long and what was often a
constructive history.

But she doesn’t want Democratic leaders and influence-brokers to encourage
the vice president into this race, Democrats close to the campaign said,
and a handful of well-connected supporters have counseled Clinton staffers
to calm nervous party members with a consciously steady performance this
week.

In public, Clinton and her aides are staying far from speculation about a
Biden candidacy. “He has to do what he has to do,” Clinton said when asked
after an event in Iowa on Wednesday. “I’m going to continue with my
campaign. I’m going to do what I believe I should be doing.”

She took no questions in Cleveland on Thursday and didn’t bring up Biden in
her prepared remarks.

“The best thing for her to do is keep on keeping on, and running her
campaign her way,” said longtime New Hampshire friend Terry Shumaker.

If Biden is working through a purely political decision, explained one
operative, Clinton would want to err on the side of drowning out his
political support by announcing endorsement and donor commitments.

But if he is making a more introspective emotional choice, the former
secretary of state’s team thinks it would be better-served skating under
the radar without letting its message divert much from issues that are also
important to Biden.

Since neither the public nor the campaign has gotten much indication about
which one of these is more the case, Clinton is balancing her approach.
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Eric D. Schwerin
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