The Note: The Week of Potential Presidents

— -- NOTABLES

--IT'S ALMOST SUMMER AND THE PRESIDENTIAL SWIMMING POOL IS GETTING CROWDED: On the heels of Rick Santorum's presidential announcement in Pennsylvania yesterday, former New York Gov. George Pataki plans to announce he's joining the ballooning field of 2016 candidates today. Pataki will be making his decision known in Exeter, New Hampshire. Earlier this year, he launched a super PAC called, "We the People, Not Washington." Pataki considered running for the White House in the past two presidential election cycles, but didn't pull the trigger, ABC's VERONICA STRACQUALURSI notes. And before the week is over, Hillary Clinton is more than likely to welcome another Democratic challenger: former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley is expected to launch his White House bid in Baltimore on Saturday, capping off a week of intense action on the 2016 campaign trail.

--FLASHBACK -- WHAT PATAKI TOLD ABC EARLIER THIS YEAR: "Will the seas part if I announce that I'll be the nominee? Of course not, but...I ran for governor and nobody gave me a chance the first time against [Gov.] Mario Cuomo. You work hard, you have the right ideas, you connect with people, you get them to believe in you, and then you win." http://yhoo.it/1MvvyVR

--FIVETHIRTYEIGHT IN THE NOTE -- WHY RICK SANTORUM IS THE YARDSTICK OF THE 2016 REPUBLICAN PRIMARY. O.K., that probably won't be the Santorum campaign's slogan, FiveThirtyEight's MICAH COHEN writes, but it should be. Santorum, effectively the runner-up for the GOP nomination in 2012, kicked off his campaign Wednesday, but he faces much longer odds in the sequel. Why? Well, the 2012 Republican race was basically a one-man show (Mitt Romney stars in ... "The Phantom Of the GOPera"), with one of the weakest fields in the modern era. The 2016 field is "Ocean's Eleven," packed with well-credential heavyweights; it's one of the strongest fields in recent history. Moreover, Santorum, who was incredibly dependent on social conservatives in 2012, has a lot more competition for their affections this go-around. Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry are all going after the same voters -- here's a graphical view of the field and more from FiveThirtyEight's HARRY ENTEN: http://53eig.ht/1dzwTPn

--ANALYSIS -- ABC's RICK KLEIN: Hillary Clinton's promise to work it hard to win votes one at a time may not ever include classic retail politics featuring open access to "everyday" voters, or freewheeling exchanges with the press. But her event Wednesday in South Carolina showed that she's serious about the effort to win votes where she needs them. On a day that the national news cycle was elsewhere, this was Clinton trying to get done what she knew she needed to get done. Bringing traces of an old twang, she reminded South Carolina voters of what they knew: That she ran against Barack Obama there and lost. (She didn't have to mention "fairy tales" or any of the racially tinged tension that animated that primary race in South Carolina.) It was a light touch on what could have been a delicate day; the Clinton camp knows that minority voters represent an area of potential vulnerability in the Democratic race. Clinton brought a simple explanation for why she ran against Obama -- and accepted his offer to work in his Cabinet: "He and I share many of the same positions about what should be done in the next presidency."

TODAY ON THE TRAIL with ABC'S CHRIS GOOD: Jeb Bush will be in Michigan, where he'll participate in a business tour and employee town hall at Emergent BioSolutions in Lansing at 1:30 pm ET. Hillary Clinton will be in Florida likely holding closed-press fundraisers. Bernie Sanders holds a town-hall at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa at 8 pm ET. Rick Santorum will hold his first campaign event at the "Original" Machine Shed restaurant in Davenport, Iowa at 4 pm ET. Rand Paul will reportedly be in Iowa, speaking at a coffeehouse and ballpark in the eastern part of the state. Mike Huckabee attends a fundraiser in Amarillo, Texas.

IN THE NOTE'S INBOX

RUBIO CAMP RELEASES VIDEO RESPONSE TO HILLARY'S SOUTH CAROLINA TRIP. A Rubio aide tells The Note: "Today our campaign will release this new video from Marco's recent trip to South Carolina. It shows a stark contrast to Hillary's visit there yesterday. Unlike her, you see Marco doing local media interviews, meeting with the public, etc." WATCH: https://youtu.be/KZo33Q2w9Z8

RICK SANTORUM ON 2016 AND SECOND CHANCES:

--';READY TO DO THIS AGAIN.' Rick Santorum, the former Republican senator from Pennsylvania who lost the GOP nomination to Gov. Mitt Romney in 2012, said yesterday he's "ready" to run for president in 2016. "I'm ready to do this again," he said in an exclusive interview with ABC's GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS. "It's an exciting opportunity," he told Stephanopoulos. "To come back home, to be at a manufacturing facility, to really reconnect to what I grew up with and understood to be an America that worked, that worked for middle-income families, that created stable neighborhoods and strong families." Santorum, 57, formally announced his intentions at an event Wednesday in Cabot, Pennsylvania, near his childhood home. "Obviously, we learned something from the last campaign," the Pennsylvania senator told Stephanopoulos. "Number one, we're gonna have more money." http://abcn.ws/1KzPAQD WATCH: http://abcn.ws/1HM6pac

--SANTORUM ON CLINTON: ';WE'VE TAKEN HER ON.' Santorum says he's ready for Hillary, but not in the way her supporters are. He told Stephanopoulos he's in "great place" to begin "countering a big, top-down, statist approach that Hillary Clinton has advocated," he said. "We've taken her on; on everything from moral and cultural issues on the floor of the United States Senate," said Santorum, who spent several years in the upper chamber alongside then-Sen. Clinton. He added that his record on national security also sets him apart from his 2016 rivals, ABC's ERIN DOOLEY reports. "National security is key," he said. "The ability to go up there and debate Hillary Clinton with a track record, not going into a debate with your experience as a briefing book, but real experiencing." http://abcn.ws/1GEMLey

--SANTORUM SLAMS RAND ON ISIS: Santorum slammed fellow 2016 hopeful Rand Paul, who said he blames Republican hawks for the rise of terrorist group ISIS. "I think that is just fundamentally a misunderstanding of the nature of the enemy we face," Santorum said. "ISIS didn't come about because of...the arms that America left behind. ISIS came about because they hate everything that we believe in and we stand for," Santorum added. "I think the idea that we accept now that this tripe from the left that it's our fault that ISIS exists -- go back to the thousand-year history of Muslim expansionism, and look at some of the horrible things that were done to spread radical Islam. That is not something that America had anything to do with." ABC's ERIN DOOLEY and ALI DUKAKIS have more: http://abcn.ws/1QaB4Nn

--EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW (AND PROBABLY DIDN'T KNOW) ABOUT RICK SANTORUM. Santorum, 57, served as a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2007, and as a U.S. congressman representing his home state for four years before that. He became the third highest-ranking Republican in the Senate in 2001, when he was elected chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, a position he held for six years. He ran for president in 2012, winning primaries and caucuses in 11 states before losing the Republican nomination to Mitt Romney. ABC's BEN GITTLESON has more. http://abcn.ws/1AuOB0H WATCH: http://abcn.ws/1FEhRku

FIVETHIRTYEIGHT IN THE NOTE: WHAT'S WRONG WITH GEORGE PATAKI? Why shouldn't he run for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination? There's the fact that Pataki hasn't been part of the political conversation since "Friends" ended. But Pataki, who's announcing his White House bid today, has one huge problem: Ideologically, he's an old-school Republican (i.e., liberal) running in a modern GOP (i.e., very conservative). More from FiveThirtyEight's HARRY ENTEN: http://53eig.ht/1ckVSo6

THE BUZZ

with ABC's VERONICA STRACQUALURSI

TWO CAMPAIGN FINANCE WATCHDOG GROUPS CALL FOR INVESTIGATION OF JEB BUSH. As Jeb Bush makes his way through key primary states, two campaign finance watchdog groups are pushing for the Department of Justice to investigate the potential candidate's interactions with his super PAC. Democracy 21 and Campaign Legal Center filed a letter with Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the DOJ requesting a Special Counsel to conduct an investigation into Bush and whether he and his Super PAC "are engaged in knowing and willful violations" of federal campaign finance laws. Bush has both his own PAC, Right to Rise, and a similarly named super PAC established to allow him to collect unlimited funds from his supporters. As a non-candidate, he can work with his super PAC as much as he likes but as soon as he launches his presidential bid, any coordination with the super PAC becomes illegal, ABC's CANDACE SMITH reports.

--WHAT THE GROUPS ALLEGE: They say Bush is intentionally delaying a formal announcement to allow his campaign to stack as much cash as possible with Bush's direct input and that despite his repeated insistence that he's not an official candidate, is in fact a candidate, at least when judged by federal law. They cite a provision in the Campaign Reform Act that states a "candidate" is an individual that has "received contributions aggregating in excess of $5,000 or has made expenditures aggregating in excess of $5,000."

--WORD FROM TEAM JEB: A spokesperson for Bush said in a statement to ABC News, "We are fully complying with the law in all activities Governor Bush is engaging in on the political front, and will continue to do so."

HILLARY CLINTON POKES FUN AT PRESIDENT OBAMA: MY HAIR WON'T TURN WHITE IN THE WHITE HOUSE. Self-dubbed hair icon and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton assured voters Wednesday that if she gets elected president, her hair -- unlike that of her would-be predecessors -- will not turn gray over the course of her term. "All of our presidents come into office looking so vigorous," Clinton said during a campaign event at the Marriott hotel in downtown Columbia, South Carolina yesterday, her first visit to the state as a presidential candidate, ABC's LIZ KREUTZ notes. "Think about what they look like on inauguration day. And then we watch them. They grow grayer and grayer, and by the time they leave, they're as white as the building they live in." "Now, let me tell you," Clinton, 67, added with a smile, "I'm aware I may not be the youngest candidate in this race, but I have one big advantage. I've been coloring my hair for years. So you're not going to see me turn white in the White House." http://abcn.ws/1dywa0X

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE REST OF THE CLINTON E-MAILS. The federal judge presiding over the case involving Hillary Clinton's 55,000 pages of emails from her tenure as secretary of state has ordered the State Department to begin releasing them in a rolling fashion beginning on June 30 and to post all of the documents eligible for release on the department's website by Jan. 29. Judge Rudolph Contreras of U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., amended a court filing from the State Department that proposed posting the emails in batches every 60 days, cutting that time period to every 30 days. In his order, the judge said the State Department should "aspire" to release 7 percent of the documents on June 30, with an increasing percentage of documents released each time, according to ABC's JUSTIN FISHEL and MIKE LEVINE. http://abcn.ws/1RoIxuN

SCOTT WALKER SUGGESTS HE'LL SKIP FLORIDA PRIMARY BATTLE. If he becomes a presidential candidate, Scott Walker said he'll compete in every state except for maybe one: Florida. "The neat thing about being around the country is if we choose to get in, I don't think there's a state out there where we wouldn't play in, other than maybe Florida, where Jeb Bush [and] Marco Rubio are, at least in some of the polls, essentially tied," the Wisconsin governor and likely GOP presidential candidate said in an interview with conservative radio show host Laura Ingraham this week. And Walker suggested that competing in Florida will eat up a lot of campaign dollars that could be otherwise spent in the competitive early states such as Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, ABC's JORDYN PHELPS writes. http://abcn.ws/1HLjikM

LINDSEY GRAHAM GOES TO ISRAEL, MEETS WITH BIBI. Days before Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is expected to jump into race for the Republican presidential nomination, the senior senator from South Carolina traveled to Israel, meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem and holding a press conference on his trip. The purpose of the visit by Graham, a longtime supporter of Israel in Congress, is to discuss U.S.-Israel bilateral relations, and the security concerns the Middle Eastern country faces, according to a release from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. The visit comes two weeks after his possible GOP presidential primary opponent Gov. Scott Walker visited Israel on a "listening trip," ABC's ALI DUKAKIS writes.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

MEET THE 97-YEAR-OLD WHO WAS SURPRISED BY OBAMA ON HER ';FIELD TRIP' TO THE WHITE HOUSE. Vivian Bailey, 97, never had the chance to go on a field trip as a child, but on Tuesday, she took the "field trip" of her dreams to the White House and was even surprised by President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. "It was quite a surprise! I had no idea we were going to meet the president and the vice president, and it was awesome," Bailey told ABC News. "It was a dream come true." Bailey was invited to tour the White House after the vice president's office saw a story about her work fundraising for an elementary school in Columbia, Maryland. ABC's ARLETTE SAENZ has more. http://abcn.ws/1Aufhim

WHO'S TWEETING?

@alexburnsNYT: The hills of Exeter, NH, are alive with the sound of Pataki http://nyti.ms/1LLTB1f

@daveweigel: Saddest thing I've seen in prez politics was Tommy Thompson promising a Fair Tax crowd to do whatever they wanted. So have fun, Pataki.

@kenvogel: Clinton Fndtn hired Sid Blumenthal at @billclinton's behest. Insiders grumbled about patronage & his $10k/mo salary. http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/clinton-foundation-sidney-blumenthal-salary-libya-118359.html?hp=t2_r ...

@nationaljournal: Carly Fiorina is taking her trolling of Hillary Clinton to the next level. http://buff.ly/1JW2CGO

@USATWashington: Trumka: Disappointment with Obama, a warning for Hillary http://usat.ly/1HMIWpa via @SusanPage