WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Hillary Clinton will announce her second run for the presidency on Sunday, starting her campaign as the Democrats' best hope of fending off a crowded field of lesser-known Republican rivals and retaining the White House.
The announcement will mark Clinton's return to the campaign trail seven years after losing the Democratic Party nomination in 2008 to Barack Obama.
Clinton has been a high-profile figure in American politics for more than two decades since her husband, Bill Clinton, won the presidency in 1992, and her fame still eclipses her other likely Democratic contenders and Republican opponents.
Her advisers, including her husband, have urged her to take nothing for granted, arguing voters would be repelled by anything that resembles a pre-ordained coronation.
A Democrat close to the Clinton camp told Reuters on Friday the former U.S. senator and secretary of state would announce her long-anticipated plans through video and social media.
After the announcement, Clinton will travel to early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, said the source, who asked to remain unidentified.
A representative for Clinton declined to comment.
Clinton, 67, has sounded out potential campaign themes during public appearances, casting herself as both a love-filled new grandmother with a vested concern in the future and a wise former diplomat who understands how countries thrive and fail.
In contrast to her 2008 campaign, Clinton has shown signs she will not play down how being a woman distinguishes her from the 44 men who have previously become president.
She has filled speeches with paeans to the moral and economic importance of gender equality and women's rights, arguing that economic growth, the health of the middle class and the stability of foreign peace treaties all hinge on reducing gender discrimination.
"Just think about all the hard-working families that depend on two incomes to make ends meet," Clinton said in a paid speech at a conference for female technology executives in California's Silicon Valley, citing her own experience of raising a young daughter while working as a partner at an Arkansas law firm in the 1980s. "When one is short-changed, the entire family suffers."
What this might mean in terms of policy proposals is vague, although she said in the same speech she was "embarrassed" the United States remained one of the few countries where there is no national right to paid family leave.
While there are a dozen or so likely Republican contenders vying for the presidency, many still relatively unknown. Clinton has a different task: reassuring voters who already like her, and wooing those who do not. Only two percent of Americans say they have never heard of her, according to a Gallup poll last month, a level of name recognition exceeding that of Vice President Joe Biden, a name unknown to a tenth of Americans.
Her nearest likely rivals for the Democratic nomination, former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley and Jim Webb, the former U.S. senator from Virginia, struggle to get a fraction of Clinton's media coverage, favorable poll numbers and donations.
(Additional reporting by Lisa Lambert and Amanda Becker; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Grant McCool)
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