During her 60 Minutes interview that aired this past Sunday, Hillary Clinton said that she couldn’t “make predictions about what’s going to happen tomorrow, or for the next year.” Well, just in case, some of her biggest fans are laying the groundwork for what may or may not happen come 2016. The Washington Post:
A super PAC supporting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, “Ready for Hillary,” was registered with the Federal Election Commission on Friday.
The group is chaired by Allida Black, founder of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project at George Washington University and Roosevelt Institute. Black was also behind a pro-Clinton PAC in the 2008 primary, WomenCount, and she pushed for Clinton’s name to be put into nomination at the convention that year. (Black was a delegate from Virginia.) She told reporters at the time that she had cashed in her retirement savings to follow Clinton to 14 states. She and Judy Beck, her partner and the group’s treasurer, served on Clinton’s Virginia Women’s Steering Committee in that election.
Black has stayed relatively quiet since the super PAC’s launch but in an email to the Center for Public Integrity, which first flagged the FEC filing, she explained: “Our purpose is simple: we are ready to work for Hillary to be president when she is ready to run.” The group is expected to launch a website in the next few weeks. (Bloomberg, meanwhile, reports that the Ready for Hillary super PAC is actually the second such pro-Hillary group registered with the FEC. The first one, named not-so-creatively Hillary Clinton Super PAC, is registered in Davenport, Iowa.)
Despite her track record as a Clinton Super Fan, Black doesn’t have any direct ties to the former first lady and departing secretary of state, nor does she need to in order to form her political organization. Anyone can set up a super PAC to support or oppose any candidate, as long as their activities aren’t directly coordinated with the candidate (a rather arbitrary requirement that has proved quite difficult to enforce).
