Hillary’s first phase of a campaign: Playing catch-up

This was supposed to be the year Hillary Clinton used to rest up.

Instead, it’s evident she’s taking the time to play catch-up.

The first hint came in March — not quite two months after she left the State Department — when Clinton formally announced her support for gay marriage in a video.  The timing of her revelation was ostensibly chosen to get ahead of the pending U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the topic.

As the nation’s top diplomat, she’d been handcuffed for the good part of four years — unable to venture into domestic policy or politics. This, in turn, helped burnish her image as a hallowed public servant sailing over the fractious debates that saddled the president and soiled the rest of the future wanna-be White House occupants.

But as a private citizen, she couldn’t let the conservative-tilted high court get ahead of her on a such a paramount issue of importance to the Democratic base and her loyal supporters.

The gay marriage box had to be checked, and so it was.

After sending the media into a certifiable tizzy by joining the ranks of the Twitterverse — (she’s tweeted a total 14 times in two months as of this writing) — and adding staffers to her corner of the Clinton Foundation, the former Secretary of State began to show small but consistent signs she was eager not only to inch back into the spotlight, but place her imprimatur on issues of the day.

She exemplified her steely side in front of a Jewish group in Los Angeles by smacking down the “outrageous” behavior of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden and fingering China as the country to blame for his freedom.

But even those comments were in the foreign policy realm, the comfort zone she occupied in her time at State.

What made Monday’s speech before the American Bar Association different was her venture into domestic policy — specifically the plight of voting rights, another holy grail for Democrats around the country.

Voter identification bills have been part of the political foray during the last two campaign cycles — but this was Clinton’s first chance to get on the record on it, and emphatically.

So she excoriated a North Carolina voter ID bill that she claimed “reads like the greatest hits of voter suppression.”  She dismissed GOP claims of election fraud as a “phantom epidemic.”  And she urged lawmakers to protect voting rights in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that she argued did the opposite.

Just as marriage is a threshold issue for much of the gay community, voting rights remain central for African-Americans, a constituency that abandoned her in 2008 for Barack Obama.  This is not to say that she needs to repair the relationship with this demographic, but its helpful that she’s nurturing it.

In her appearance in San Francisco, she also announced she would deliver a series of speeches in the coming months to address other high-profile policy issues, beginning next month in Philadelphia when she takes on national security and government transparency.

Just another step toward a 2016 candidacy, sure.

But more presciently, a concerted effort to assert herself on a series of issues that have consumed the public arena while she was sidelined.

Clinton’s position as Secretary of State placed her in a protective cocoon to be sure — but it also removed her from the great debate of ideas that any potential candidate needs to take part in.

One could argue that there’s no need for Clinton to enter the foray now — that she enjoys a front-runner status that would allow her to stay out of the weeds on policy until at least 2014.

But that’s a mindset of 2006-2007, the last time she was a front-runner.

These series of moves by Hillary shows she recognizes it’s necessary for her to not only stake out positions on issues that have long lingered in the public sphere, but perhaps break fresh ground with a new idea.

Clinton is smart enough to know that there’s only a certain window of time when she can fully control the issues she addresses and the terms in which she decides to do so.  The left is already rumbling about Social Security – and once she embarks on the 2014 book tour, does the TODAY show hit, sits down with Oprah, Ellen, BuzzFeed Brews (?) and the like . . . she’s no longer in the driver’s seat.

So while the rest of the pack gallops into Iowa and networks with donors in New York, the first phase of the 2016 prospective Clinton campaign is unfurling in a different way that illuminates her unique stature.

It’s anything but restful reflection.

It’s reaffirming herself first and foremost as a woman of resonant ideas; and initially, that entails playing catch-up and making up for time outside the fray.

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Follow Dave’s blog at TheRun2016.com