I thought she’d lie low for the rest of the year, quietly assembling her team, and then reemerge in 2014 once Obama’s lame-duckery has swallowed what little is left of his influence. Nope. No waiting around for Hillary. Campaign 2016 begins next month.

She’s running.

Clinton said her appearance at the annual meeting of the American Bar Association marked the beginning of a speaking series she’ll embark upon that will also include an address on the United States’ national security policies next month in Philadelphia.

Clinton said the September address would focus of issues of “transparency and balance.” The former top diplomat had not yet publicaly addressed the classified National Security Agency surveillance programs that were revealed through leaks at the beginning of the summer…

In her remarks in San Francisco Monday, Clinton took aim at policies she said were unfairly limiting access to polls for minority voters, and said June’s Supreme Court decision gutting the federal Voting Rights Act was a grave mistake. That ruling effectively invalidated a key provision of the 1965 law that gives the federal government oversight of states and localities with a history of voter discrimination.

If that’s not a strong enough sign, here’s a choice bit from Carlos Danger’s chat with BuzzFeed this afternoon:

.@BuzzFeedBen: "Do you know what [Huma's] role in Hillary's 2016 campaign is going to be?" Weiner (affirmatively): "I do."

— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) August 12, 2013

The NSA debate and the Voting Rights Act are exactly where you’d expect her to begin. She’s not worried about losing centrists in a Democratic primary, especially with Bill stumping for her. She’s worried about leftist suspicion of the Clintons fueling another potentially dangerous insurgent candidacy that catches on with grassroots Dems and causes her headaches. So she’s going to woo the left and minority voters — O’s coalition — on key issues and trust that blue-collar Democrats will be there for her as always, even if ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton is her chief opponent. That’s why she’s getting started early on this, I think: Biden’s signaling that he’s still thinking about a run too, per his upcoming appearance in Iowa. He’s stuck with running on the totality of Obama’s record but Hillary’s really only stuck with the foreign policy bits, and even there she’s going to put some distance between herself and The One. Her NSA speech will, assuredly, signal greater concern for civil liberties vis-a-vis the feds’ surveillance programs than Obama’s own rhetoric has. Run on O’s record in the primary where it helps her with the left, run leftward when it doesn’t, and run on Bill’s economic record in the general. That’s the Hillary formula. Dude, I’m nervous.

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