Hillary Clinton returns to Iowa as talk of 2016 picks up

Clinton will make her first appearance in the Hawkeye State since 2008 on Sunday at the 37th and final Harkin Steak Fry

A man walks by a bus supporting former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the location for Senator Tom Harkin's 37th Steak Fry in Indianola, Iowa, September 13, 2014. REUTERS/Jim Young (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS)

DES MOINES, Iowa — When Hillary Clinton arrived in the U.S. Senate in 2001 as the junior senator from the Empire State, she made a point of putting her head down, deferring to and learning from her colleagues, and focusing on the work of the Senate.

It was an attempt to undermine and counteract the intense media glare that had followed her since her days as first lady in the 1990s, and to curry favor among her peers, the press and the public as being a good soldier.

When Clinton makes an appearance in the Hawkeye State on Sunday at the 37th and final Harkin Steak Fry — which is named after Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who is retiring this year — she will need a somewhat similar strategy. Clinton will pay tribute to Harkin and attempt not to overshadow him during his swan song. And she will, for the first time in a long while, play the role of partisan speech-giver, rallying supporters on behalf of Iowa Democrats who are competing in this fall’s midterm elections.

The group Ready for Hillary, which is not formally affiliated with Clinton but which is preparing some parts of a campaign in waiting for her, is taking the same approach to the steak fry.

“This can’t be seen as completely looking toward 2015, 2016. There’s a lot of close races. This is Harkin’s last steak fry,” said Derek Eadon, the group's Midwest organizing director. “Our signs will say, ‘Thank you, Tom' on them, ‘Thank you, Ruth [Harkin],' 'Ready to Vote.’"

Nonetheless, Hillary will be the main attraction; it will be difficult for her not to eclipse everyone else. This is her first trip to Iowa since the 2008 presidential campaign, when she departed around midnight after losing the first-in-the-nation caucuses to then-Sen. Barack Obama. She had been the favorite to win the nomination, but Iowa voters upended her plans and sent her into a tailspin.

Now the odds are even greater that she will be the Democratic nominee in 2016. She has yet to announce her candidacy, but it is now treated as an inevitability.

And so the only political suspense at the event will be whether Clinton’s political speech-making skills — which have never been considered jaw-dropping — can excite a crowd the way that other Democratic politicians' have been able to.

“In 2007, this is where Barack Obama introduced himself to Iowans, and he sure got the crowd fired up. A lot of people are expecting the same from Hillary,” said Mike Fitzgerald, Iowa’s state treasurer, who was one of the first elected officials in 2008 to endorse Obama rather than Clinton.

She will have some competition. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, one of the greatest living Democratic speechifiers, is also speaking at the steak fry, which will be held in Indianola, about 20 miles south of Des Moines.

“We’ve grown to expect every time Bill Clinton gets up, for him to give a whopper of a speech. Everybody knows Harkin,” Fitzgerald said. “There are high expectations of [Hillary Clinton], and she’s onstage with one of the best political speakers in politics, Bill Clinton. We’ll see. I hope she can do it. I’m almost surprised she put herself in that kind of a position.”

There's little doubt that Bill Clinton will do everything in his power to tee up his wife for success.

Regardless, the former secretary of state will have to tread a fine line: She will want to rev up the crowd while not distracting completely from Harkin and the midterm elections.

Clinton’s stiffness as a public figure is a target for Republicans in Iowa, who are raising questions about her ability to connect with people in the state.

“Unless there’s some kind of born-again experience in terms of her ability to interact with the common person and the common Iowan, I think she’s got some issues,” said Iowa GOP Chairman Jeff Kauffman in a conference call Friday.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus sounded like a Democrat in 2012 talking about Republican nominee Mitt Romney, harping on Clinton’s comment over the summer that she was “dead broke” after she and her husband left the White House.

“She had a multimillion-dollar book deal lined up and was busy mansion-shopping in Westchester County in New York,” Priebus said on a GOP conference call in advance of the steak fry. "And you know, whether it be Iowa or whether it be someone like me from Wisconsin, most people just don’t relate to lives like that.”

Clinton lost in 2008 because she was, and still is, Priebus said, “one of the most out-of-touch politicians in America.”

It had all the marks of the opening salvo in what is likely to be a 26-month firefight between the Republican Party and Hillary Clinton.