Hillary is running for president

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton at a book signing in December. Clinton has announced that she plans to run for the 2008 Democratic nomination for president. Mario Tama/Getty Images.

Well, she is now in. New York Senator Hillary Clinton has just announced that she is running for the 2008 Democratic nominee for president. Here is the New York Times story:

Six years after making history by winning a United States Senate seat as first lady, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton announced this morning that she was taking the first formal step to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, a journey that would break yet more political barriers in her extraordinary and controversial career.

“I’m in,” she says in a statement on her new campaign Web site. “And I’m in to win.”

Mrs. Clinton, 59, called for “bold but practical changes” in foreign, domestic, and national security policy and said that she would focus on finding “a right end” to the Iraq war, expanding health insurance, pursuing greater energy independence and strengthening Social Security and Medicare.

In her statement, Mrs. Clinton also squarely confronted an issue that concerns many Democrats: Whether she can, in fact, win the presidency. Some voters still associate her most with the controversies of the Clinton administration, and Republicans have long attacked and caricatured her, and plan to brand her as indecisive on Iraq.

“I have never been afraid to stand up for what I believe in or to face down the Republican machine,” Mrs. Clinton said on the Web site. “After nearly $70 million spent against my campaigns in New York and two landslide wins, I can say I know how Washington Republicans think, how they operate, and how to beat them.”

If successful, Mrs. Clinton would be the first female nominee of a major American political party, and she would become the first spouse of a former president to seek a return to the White House. President Bill Clinton left office in 2000 after two terms marked by robust economic expansion and a series of investigation into his personal life and the Clintons’ business dealings.

Clinton's website has posted a video of this announcement that you can view here.

Now there is this one little interesting detail I should note from the Times story:

Senator Clinton is the seventh Democrat to join the likely field of candidates who will officially start vying for the nomination next January in the Iowa presidential caucuses.

She joins Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, who announced plans to run on Tuesday; former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, the 2004 vice presidential nominee; Senators Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut; former Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa; and Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio. An eighth, Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, is expected to declare on Sunday that he is forming an exploratory committee as well.

[....]

Her advisers this week rejected an idea spreading in Democratic circles that she would rush to announce as a way to overshadow Mr. Obama, who has engendered intense Democratic interest as a steady critic of the Iraq war and as a skilled orator who comes across as a nonpartisan and unifying force in politics.

Like Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama is also poised to make history. If successful in the primaries, he would be the first African-American to win the Democratic nomination. He is her only real rival at this point in drawing huge crowds of voters at political stops and in driving the 2008 political discussion in the media.

I should say that this is our first example of Hillaryspin for president. Do you really expect me to believe that Clinton's announcement was just a coincidence--just days after Obama's announcement, and who has been picking up mojo press brownie points for jumping into the race first? Please Hillary--I've heard enough PR-spin from the masters of PR-spin that currently reside in the White House. This kind of crap is the last we need to hear from you now--not if you want to take on the neocons in the Republican Party.

But for now, we've got ourselves a great horse race on the Democratic Party between Hillary, Obama, John Edwards, and Bill Richardson. All the speculation of who is running is now over. The horses are getting into their starting gates.

The 2008 Democratic Presidential horse race is on!