Hillary Clinton announces 2016 bid — but the same vulnerabilities and weaknesses remain

In a way, it's fitting that Hillary Clinton has announced her 2016 presidential campaign the Sunday after most Christians celebrated Easter: the presumptive frontrunner for the Democratic nomination is attempting a political resurrection.

I'm running for president. Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion. –H https://t.co/w8Hoe1pbtC

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) April 12, 2015

After a surprising and embarrassing loss to Barack Obama, Clinton is already back to where she was eight years ago: far and away her party's strongest contender for the presidency. If anything, she is in a more dominant position.

As late as December 2007, Clinton enjoyed an 18-point lead over her nearest competition among Democrats nationally. 'Gallup’s 2007 national presidential polling strongly points to Clinton winning the 2008 Democratic nomination,' the legendary American pollsters concluded in a review conducted October of that year. 'Barring something unusual or otherwise unexpected, she is well positioned for the 2008 Democratic primaries.'

We all know how that turned out. But this time, Clinton's leads in national polls of Democrats range from 42 to 54 percentage points. Her nearest rival, progressive Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, almost certainly won't run. The next closest, Vice President Joe Biden, will face heavy donor pressure to stay on the sidelines. Two Democrats who do seem at least somewhat serious about running against — former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley and former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb — are each averaging a shade better than 1 percent of the vote.

Clinton looks even better in the early states. In Iowa, where her devastating third-place finish derailed her 2008 campaign, she is averaging close to 60 percent of the vote. In New Hampshire, where she beat Obama last time around, she's up by at least 25 points. In South Carolina, another state she once lost, she generally leads by more than 40 points.

Oddly, Hillary has all the same vulnerabilities she had eight years ago. The former Iraq war supporter — as a Democratic senator from New York, she voted to authorize the invasion — is still more hawkish on foreign policy than most of her party. She is cozy with Wall Street and big business while Democrats are in a populist mood.

In fact, many of these problems have gotten worse. As Obama's first secretary of state, her main legacy appears to be a military intervention in Libya that was as disastrous as the Iraq war, albeit without the American casualties (with the significant exception of the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, which occurred after the war for regime change was over).

Clinton's family foundation has extensive corporate ties, with 60 companies that lobbied the State Department while she was in charged donating $26 million, and received millions of dollars in foreign donations while she was still secretary of state. None of this is a good look for a party with less tolerance for Bill Clinton's business-friendly Third Way politics than in the 1990s.

All this may or may not tie into Hillary's decision to use a private email server while secretary of state. This at minimum violated rules that were in place governing the department's email use. At maximum, she was deliberately circumventing processes that would have made it easier to subject her emails to public records requests.

Clinton has defended herself by saying she's turned over tens out thousands of emails, but she deleted tens of thousands too. What was given over to the government and what was erased was left to the discretion of her team. There have been conflicting accounts as to whether the emails were even opened and read as part of the process for determining what would be deleted.

All the old Clinton problems with money, shady foreign donors and secrecy seem to be back, in a media environment that is much faster and less forgiving than it was even in 2008. So why is she stronger than ever?

On the one hand, Hillary seemed unbeatable during his first presidential campaign too -- that is, until somebody beat her. Once that aura of inevitability was punctured in Iowa, her campaign was never really the same.

That's one way of looking at it. The other was that the Clinton did not take her 2008 rivals seriously until it was too late, by which point it was obvious that Obama was uniquely well positioned to exploit her vulnerabilities while winning supermajorities of African-Americans eager to elect the first black president of the United States — and she still only narrowly lost the nomination.

It's hard to imagine socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders replicating Obama's success. If Clinton can finally seize the nomination that eluded her, her prospects in the general election are far less certain. It's usually the Democrats who nominate the unfamiliar face, someone younger and more exciting. Bill Clinton, nominated before his 46th birthday, was an example.

Hillary is already 67. If elected, she will turn 70 during her first year in office. She has been a national figure since the early 1990s. 'Becoming a grandmother has made me think deeply about the responsibility we all share as stewards of the world we inherit and will one day pass on,' she has written in the run-up to the campaign.

Unless the Republicans nominate Jeb Bush, the GOP candidate will be the unfamiliar face. That's why Clinton's potential to be the first woman president will loom large in her campaign. George McGovern said in his 2008 Hillary endorsement, 'Ladies first.' We'll see if the voters agree.

W. James Antle III is managing editor of the Daily Caller and author of Devouring Freedom? Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped?