By Uche Onyenbadi
FOR a long time, Hillary Rodham Clinton stood by the sidelines and let political pundits stretch their imagination about when she will formally declare her intention to run for the U.S. presidency.

Last Sunday, she ended all speculations and announced herself as a candidate in the 2016 race for the occupancy of the White House. If elected, she will make history in all sorts of ways: the first female president of the United States; the first U.S. First Lady to shatter the glass ceiling of male dominance of politics at the highest level in the United States; the first grandma to become a U.S. president; the first woman to reverse roles and have her husband, a former U.S. president, become the First Gentleman at the White House. The list is interminable.

Hillary

If the world expected Hillary to launch her bid for the presidency with the loudest bang possible, it somewhat came as a surprise that she chose the least “noise-making” forum to begin the race: social media! Unlike Republicans Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio who declared their interest in the presidency with a lot of fanfare, Hillary opted to start on a low tone. Apparently, her calculation is that there is no need zooming off in high gear when the presidential race is more like a marathon than a hundred meters stretch.

She declared her candidacy in a video message that was two minutes eighteen seconds long, with a simple message: “Everyday Americans need a champion. I want to be that champion.” Last Saturday, President Obama endorsed Hillary’s candidacy in unequivocal terms. According to the president, “she was a formidable candidate in 2008, she was a great supporter of mine in the general election, she was an outstanding secretary of state, she is my friend. I think she would be an excellent president. The one thing I can say is, she’s going to be able to handle herself very well in any conversation or debates around foreign policy. And her track record with respect to domestic policies is I think one that cares about working families.”

It is reasonable to wonder why Hillary decided to launch her presidential bid in this low-key fashion. Her political handlers and strategists could have staged a Hollywood-style event to kick-off her campaign. Perhaps, history has been her best teacher. The last time she stepped out to run for the presidency, it was all fanfare and razzmatazz and a sense of mission accomplished even before the race began. That inflated sense of self-importance and misguided spirit of courage were to be shattered when a relatively political nonentity called Barack Obama suddenly appeared on the scene and wrecked her ambition. Obama who had little or no name-recognition among the electorate turned the table with a simple catch-phrase known as Yes-We-Can. By the time the Hillary camp adjusted their strategy to put up a spirited fight, the young one-term senator from the state of Illinois was too far ahead in the polls that catching up with him was impossible.

This time, the Hillary camp may have seen the wisdom in some modesty and humility, and working from the bottom up, as opposed to relying on the name “Clinton” to do the magic. Besides, the camp must have learned a lesson from the Obama camp about the power of social media in modern elections, especially in mobilizing the young and young at heart. If Hillary bases her calculations largely on the support of the older folk, she might witness a repeat of the movie that failed her in 2007-2008. So, while the take-off of her campaign may be seen as muted and low-key, it might in fact be loud and clear to the Internet-social media savvy younger generation whose votes might determine who wins or loses in 2016

Only woman in the race

No doubt, Hillary’s entry will enliven the race. She is likely to be the only woman in a race that will feature an all-male tag-team from the Republican Party. The only woman with some credibility who could have challenged Hillary in the Democratic Party’s primaries is Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts. But, she does not wish to run in this election cycle.

So, the likely scenario is to have a line-up of male Republicans, each trying so desperately to outdo the rest of the pack, in hurling all manners of innuendos at Hillary. To win the Republican Party’s primaries, there isn’t much really to talk about outside denouncing Obama and his policies, especially his health care law, upholding Americans’ right to bear arms, pouring more money into the arms industry, fighting terrorism everywhere there is a semblance of it, playing to the gallery with such sanctimonious positions as being anti-gay rights, and of course singling out Hillary for the worst form of vilification.

As a result of the Republican Party’s new majority in the Senate and House of Representatives, whoever emerges as the party’s presidential candidate is assured of allies in Congress who will use their privileged positions to dig up real and imagined dirt in Hillary’s closet. An attractive issue around which the Republican law-makers will sharpen their arms against Hillary includes the fact that she used her private e-mail account to conduct official business while she served as the U.S. Secretary of State.

Whoever eventually emerges as the Republican Party presidential candidate will discover that campaigning against Hillary Clinton will be a formidable task.