Ties to the Obama White House already run deep. The Clinton campaign apparatus is stuffed with former top Obama administration policy makers and strategists, including former White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri, former Obama senior counselor John Podesta, and former Michelle Obama aide Kristina Schake.
Administration officials deny any planned direct coordination between the Obama White House and the Clinton campaign on messaging or legislative agenda, but do not rule it out.
“I’m confident that there will be a lot of agreement between the priorities that she articulates and the kinds of priorities this president has been fighting for the last six years,” said spokesman Josh Earnest late last month.
Obama, Clinton Remain Allies
On a personal level, Obama and Clinton have maintained in close touch, holding occasional in-person meetings and regularly exchanging email messages, officials say. They last met together in the Oval Office in late March when they discussed their families, current events and politics, aides said.
“Are there going to be differences? Yeah. Deep differences? Of course,” Clinton told “60 Minutes” in the 2013 joint interview. How those play out on the stump will be a difficult balancing act. Obama and his policies remain highly popular among Democratic voters, but much more contentious among independents and Republicans.
Forty-seven percent of Americans approve of President Obama’s work in office, according to the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll. The same number disapprove.
For now, the soon-to-be-candidate Clinton is signaling that her focus will be on the overlap in interests and priorities with Obama – revealing less daylight than many pundits had initially expected.
Will we see President Obama and Hillary Clinton exchange another bear hug on stage? Maybe not soon – but don’t rule it out.
“As it relates to the president’s intentions to wade into a Democratic primary, that’s not something that he often does,” Earnest said. “But we’ll see. A long way until the Democratic convention.”
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PHOTO: Barack Obama, left, greets Hillary Clinton, right, following the State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill on Jan. 24, 2012 in Washington, D.C.
