Behind the Scenes of the Clinton Rollout

Jan. 20, 2007 — -- The flip side of Hillary Clinton's sometimes self-destructive tendeancy towards caution is the positive extent to which she plans things out and addresses her problems.

Her political team does the same thing.

Behind the scenes for months (and with no leaking) Clinton's advisers have been strategizing about how to deal with her vulnerabilities. We will see more manifestations of this in the coming days and weeks: Look for the members of her campaign's leadership committee, for instance, to address some perceived problems and highlight areas of broad support.

Two of these gambits we have already seen as part of the announcement effort are meant to address twin weaknesses -- Iraq and a lack of support in the blogosphere.

Clinton's trip to Iraq (and Afghanistan and Pakistan) was meant to show her astride the world like a leader, and allowed her to come back and claim new insight into the region and President Bush's war policy.

If you think the timing of the trip was a coincidence, please remember one of Bill Clinton's favorite Arkansas expressions: "If you see a turtle on a fence post, it probably didn't get there by itself."

Becoming more vocally opposed to Bush on the war is key to Clinton's chances of winning her party's nomination, and, as part of that, winning over the so-called netroots. Clinton long ago hired two leading bloggers to be part of her political team. And one of her newly-minted campaign's first moves late Saturday was to e-mail to reporters the results of their first day, including Internet sign-ups and a survey of positive reactions from leading liberal bloggers.

She still has plenty of vulnerabilities, but Clinton and her team know what those are, and every one has a plan associated with it to try to address the problems.