Hillary Will Run Again, Returning to Her Old Self

A longtime adviser to Hillary Clinton has made a prediction in the Wall Street Journal that will be very good news to some Democratic voters and very bad news to others: Hillary Clinton is running again. So writes Mark Penn, a pollster and adviser to the Clintons from 1995 to 2008, in an op-ed co-authored with Andrew Stein, president of the New York City Council. Their premise is that Clinton will return to the Hillary Clinton of old, "the universal-health-care-promoting progressive firebrand of 1994." Think of it as "Hillary Clinton 4.0." In earlier iterations, version 2.0 lost to Barack Obama as a centrist and version 3.0 lost to Donald Trump after blowing it with white, middle-class voters. The new version of Clinton, however, has learned from all these mistakes.

"Clinton has a 75% approval rating among Democrats, an unfinished mission to be the first female president, and a personal grievance against Mr. Trump, whose supporters pilloried her with chants of 'Lock her up!,'" the authors write. "This must be avenged." She's also had two years to assess her defeat to Trump and what she did wrong. What about the new generation of Democrats? They proved they're not ready for prime time with the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Meanwhile, Mike Bloomberg will support her rather than run against her, they write, and Joe Biden wouldn't stand a chance. Clinton might not announce early, perhaps not until after Iowa, "but rest assured that, one way or another, Hillary 4.0 is on the way." Click to read the full op-ed. (More Hillary Clinton stories.)