Hillary Clinton will reinvent herself as a “liberal firebrand” and mount a third presidential bid in 2020, her longtime adviser Mark Penn predicted in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal published Monday.
“Get ready for Hillary Clinton 4.0. More than 30 years in the making, this new version of Mrs. Clinton, when she runs for president in 2020, will come full circle—back to the universal-health-care-promoting progressive firebrand of 1994,” wrote Penn, who co-authored the op-ed with New York city council president Andrew Stein.
The former Secretary of State and twice-failed presidential candidate won’t “let a little thing like two stunning defeats stand in the way of her claim to the White House,” the pair wrote of Clinton’s resolve to defeat Trump in 2020.
Philippe Reines, another longtime Clinton adviser, made a similar prediction in a Politico op-ed published last month, in which he argued Clinton was uniquely well-suited to defeat Trump relative to the more widely-discussed 2020 Democratic contenders.
Rather than casting herself as a moderate to win over the Midwestern Democrats who defected to vote for Trump, Penn and Stein argue Clinton should run as a hard-left partisan.
“She has decisively to win those Iowa caucus-goers who have never warmed up to her. They will see her now as strong, partisan, left-leaning and all-Democrat—the one with the guts, experience and steely-eyed determination to defeat Mr. Trump,” they wrote.