Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Poker Face Is Completely Inscrutable

Political Stratego champion Hillary Clinton is frustrating potential opponents in the 2016 presidential race by keeping her plans super secret. Is her “transition office” in a small corporate space on Connecticut Avenue in Washington D.C. the beehive of advance polling everyone thinks it is, or is it really just a place where the Clintons can binge on HGTV’s homogeneous home improvement shows, snarking on all the bourgeois choices people make with their granite countertops and beige wall paint? The distressing truth is nobody, not even avuncular Crest Whitening Strips spokesman Joe Biden, knows what Hillary is up to.

She’s probably getting ready to run for president in 2016, though. According to the New York Times‘ Hillary Watch, a network of former staff members and campaign volunteers have started a political action committee called “Ready for Hillary” with the Iowa caucuses at least 33 months away. “Ready” is dedicated to what ardent Hillary supporters hope will be a 2016 presidential run, something major polling outfits have predicated the former Secretary of State would do quite well in: according to a poll from Quinnipiac University, Clinton trounced hypothetical Republican foes Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio by 11 percentage points each.

Still, whispers of Clinton’s imminent presidential campaign are only whispers. Nobody really knows what she’s about to do, and although some friends and advisers are worried that her continued ambivalence to a 2016 run could scare major Democratic donors into the Joe Biden carnival camp (Big Top Joe 2016 is awfully catchy), Clinton’s presidential deliberations have thrown her potential opponents off balance. Who’d be crazy enough to step in front of the Hillary ‘16 campaign bus? Harold M. Ickes, a senior adviser on Clinton’s 2008 campaign, said that “a number of donors” are basically standing by, “willing to write whatever they’re permitted to write to a presidential campaign, and certainly to write very big money to any sort of ‘super PAC’ that would be supportive of [Hillary].”

It would seem that, after a taxing run as a jet-setting Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton is the only person who’d seriously threaten a Hillary Clinton presidential run in 2016. According to the Times, she’s about to launch a “lucrative public speaking career” with the Harry Walker Agency, which represents her husband, Dick Cheney, and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. Plus, there’s all that House Hunters and Love It or List It to watch, and we all know that the siren call of granite countertops has ruined many a promising political career.

A Clinton ‘Transition’ Keeps Opponents and Donors Frozen in Place [NY Times]