Hillary Clinton Begins Process of Vetting — Herself

Conscious of the fact that she is hated by many in the Christofascist/Tea Party base of the GOP - irrationally so, in my view - Hillary Clinton has hired a consulting firm to vet herself.  Stated another way, the firm will be researching things that could be hurled at Clinton during a presidential campaign, both by her opponent and dark money conservative PACs working against Clinton and  other Democrats.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this process.  Here are excerpts:

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the subject of intense news media attention and public scrutiny for the last three decades, is preparing for another thorough vetting as she plans for a likely presidential campaign. In this case, however, it’s not Republicans trying to thwart her or journalists looking for a juicy scoop, but researchers she herself has hired.

Mrs. Clinton, who is all but assured to seek the Democratic presidential nomination for a second time, has hired the firm New Partners, an outfit with a history of doing deep research projects, to handle at least some portion of the work, known in the political world as “self-opposition research.”

She is also close to hiring a research director for her likely campaign, a role that in the 2008 race was filled by Judd Legum, currently the editor in chief for the liberal news site ThinkProgress.

The scope of the firm’s work is unclear. But self-research is considered critical in campaigns. And in the six years since Mrs. Clinton was last a candidate, she has created a paper trail of paid speeches, charitable donations and diplomatic decisions as secretary of state.

For months, Democrats not aligned with Mrs. Clinton had privately wondered whether she had started the process of assessing the scope of existing documents, information and other potential material her rivals could use against her. Some expressed concern that she was beginning this self-scrubbing process relatively late, and might not leave herself enough time to learn about her own potential vulnerabilities to be able to respond effectively.

Their concerns were prompted by a string of stories by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website that extensively reviewed archival material at the Clinton presidential library in Little Rock, Ark., and came up with an audio tape of Mrs. Clinton discussing a rape case she had worked on as a defense lawyer in the 1980s.

The tape was a reminder that, with so much scrutiny applied by the news media and Mrs. Clinton’s opponents in her public life, it’s a challenge for rivals to come up with new material, and to make any fresh information stick. That was a frequent problem for President Obama’s campaign when he ran against Mrs. Clinton in the primaries in 2008, when both were senators.

More recently, Republicans and reporters have turned their sights to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation for accepting donations from foreign countries after Mrs. Clinton left the State Department. The scrutiny has focused on which entities donated to the foundation, and whether there was any overlap with Mrs. Clinton’s diplomatic work.

[T]he focus on the foundation and its work is likely to be a source of ongoing focus for Mrs. Clinton’s opponents. And the spate of recent stories underscore why the self-research process is a relatively urgent task.