Before Hillary Clinton could even declare her candidacy for US president this week, Jeb Bush had tied her to Barack Obama and “damaged relationships” around the world.
“Is the world a safer place because Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State?” asked Texas senator Ted Cruz. “The answer is obvious. No.”
Senator Rand Paul called the former secretary of state “the worst of the Washington machine – the arrogance of power, corruption and cover-up, conflicts of interest and failed leadership with tragic consequences”.
Forty-three-year-old senator Marco Rubio, in announcing his candidacy on Monday, went for a generational contrast: “yesterday is over” was his attack line.
Clinton may have been short on policy and long on message en route to Iowa during the opening leg of her campaign, but her Republican rivals are busy testing attack lines to take the momentum out from under her.
Longtime GOP strategists and upstart “Stop Hillary” operatives outlined several distinct approaches to going after Clinton that may be used against her for months – if not years – to come: criticizing her record at the State Department, returning to the controversy over her personal email and lambasting the entirety of the 67-year-old’s “scandal-ridden career”.
What remains to be seen in the 574 days before Election Day is whether any of the anti-Clinton tricks will work – or whether Clinton can turn back around her historical disadvantages and fight back.
“This is a world in pure chaos and she was in the lead seat as secretary of state,” the Florida Republican adviser Rick Wilson told the Guardian on Monday, citing what he called a “reset” with Russia and an imperfect American response to the Arab spring.
The line was echoed hours later by Rubio, in a Miami speech rolling out his candidacy: “When America fails to lead, global chaos inevitably follows.”
Beyond Republican scare lines, Wilson noted “some lingering radiation with a lot of Democratic base voters” over Clinton’s 2002 vote for the Iraq war.
Bush has not officially declared his candidacy but has already pushed anti-Clinton supporters to be “committed to stopping her”.
The former Florida governor, who has sought to distance himself from his brother’s foreign policy and “do it on my own” even as he re-hires members of the team that pushed to invade Iraq, released a video ahead of Clinton’s announcement on Sunday that went directly after her record.
“We must do better than the Obama-Clinton foreign policy that has damaged relationships with our allies and emboldened our enemies,” Bush said, “better than their their failed, big government policies” on the economy.
On the domestic front, where Clinton offered hints in her own video that “the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top”, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum released a statement suggesting the former first lady was out of touch: “I believe we need a president who puts the American worker first, not the corporate interests the Clintons have aligned with.”
Indeed, Republican operatives and a growing number of opposition researchers are busy dredging up nearly a quarter-century of animosity toward the Clinton family – not just from the conservative base but what they see as a wide swath of voters.
According to a recent Bloomberg poll, 29% of respondents had “very unfavorable” feelings toward the former secretary of state – higher than any other political figure polled, including George W Bush and Congress as a whole.
As Wilson noted, Clinton has been in the public eye for so long that “there’s no novelty about Hillary, no newness”. The result, he said, is that even among those not inclined to dislike her, a certain sense of “Clinton fatigue” has set in. Those tired of her decades in the public eye – on both sides of the aisle – can make for veiled or outright jabs at Clinton’s age and experience.
The Stop Hillary Pac, an organization funded almost entirely by small donors and devoted solely to riling up opposition to the former secretary of state, is poised to peel away at the entirety of Clinton’s “scandal-ridden career”, spokesman Matthew Chisholm said.
“From her early days as an attorney to Clinton Foundation’s shady fundraising and ‘servergate’, there’s no shortage of Clinton improprieties,” he told the Guardian.
Clinton controversy spans back to Whitewater, the much-scrutinized Arkansas land investment in which Bill and Hillary Clinton lost $300,000. The deal and its link to a failed savings-and-loan business prompted years of investigations by independent prosecutors that culminated in the revelation of Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. The Clintons were never linked to criminal wrongdoing related to the land deal, but several others connected to the transaction were prosecuted and convicted.
Wilson, who worked on Rudy Giuliani’s stillborn US Senate campaign in 2000, dismissed much of what happened in Hillary Clinton’s past as “not all that compelling”. He argued that while the former secretary of state “played a central role in cleaning up” her husband’s “multi-decade infidelities” along with unexplored details of Whitewater and her investments in cattle futures in the 1980s, the media was “going to ignore” it as old news.
But Republicans still see opportunities in drawing attention back to more recent – if slightly less scandalous – Clinton controversies.
The @GOP is sending reporters flash drives labeled "Clinton Email Files" filled with some oppo pic.twitter.com/Tf09t9WtD3
— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) April 13, 2015
The Republican National Committee has been sending out flash drives filled with opposition research to draw attention to the controversy around what it calls Clinton’s “homebrew email server”.
The same Bloomberg poll, from before Clinton’s announcement, showed a majority of Americans believe Clinton has not been truthful about turning over emails from her tenure at the State Department.
It remains to be seen whether this distrust of the former secretary of state will continue once the campaign begins in earnest. Clinton will hold her first event as a presidential candidate on Tuesday in Monticello, Iowa.
