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 The overwhelming favorite for the Democratic presidential
nomination, Clinton will nonetheless face multiple challenges as she
returns to the campaign trail seven years after losing the
nomination in 2008 to Barack Obama.
She 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 the other likely Democratic
contenders and Republican opponents.
But with the fame comes a set of challenges Clinton will need to
overcome in the coming months. She will try to get past a
controversy over her use of personal email while secretary of state,
and find a way to connect with ordinary Americans after her years as
the top U.S. diplomat.
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 that
Clinton, who is also a former U.S. senator, would announce her
long-anticipated plans through video and social media.
After the announcement, she will travel to the 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 served as U.S. 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 women 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
Clinton said in the same speech she was "embarrassed" that the
United States remained one of the few countries where there is no
national right to paid family leave.
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 2 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 10th
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.
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Clinton's use of social media to announce her White House run
amounts to the adoption of tactics deployed by Obama in 2008 to
raise large sums through small donations and appeal to young voters.
Also on Friday, Clinton released an update to her memoir, "Hard
Choices," in which she described her final days as secretary of
state and her feelings about her first grandchild.
CONTROVERSY AND CRITICISM
Clinton has been a target for Republican criticism since Bill
Clinton's first presidential campaign. He promised voters then that
they would get "two for one" by putting them both in the White
House, but quickly dropped that claim when it proved unpopular.
Hillary Clinton's biggest initiative while her husband was
president, national healthcare reform, fell apart without coming to
a vote in Congress.
She became a figure of public fascination, and admiration in some
quarters, for standing by her husband when allegations of his sexual
infidelities first surfaced during his 1992 presidential campaign,
and again in 1998 when his affair with White House intern Monica
Lewinsky surfaced.
Both the Clintons have been investigated repeatedly by Republican
lawmakers and the then United States Office of the Independent
Counsel.
As Hillary Clinton prepared to start her campaign, she faced
criticism from Republicans for using only a personal email account
while secretary of state, and for the Clinton Foundation's reliance
on donations and payments from foreign governments for its
philanthropy work abroad, even as she served as the country's top
diplomat.
Clinton has said she should have used a government email account as
secretary of state while insisting that she had violated no rules.
During the campaign, Clinton will be expected to say whether she
will more closely align with the centrist economic policies of her
husband's administration or the populist policies championed by the
progressive wing of her party.
Some Democrats have urged Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts,
a leader of the party's liberal wing and a critic of Wall Street and
big banks, to challenge her, but Warren has declined.
(Additional reporting by Lisa Lambert and Amanda Becker; Editing by
Grant McCool and Leslie Adler)
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