Hillary eyes Brooklyn for campaign HQ

Hillary Clinton is focused on housing her 2016 campaign headquarters in New York City — potentially in Brooklyn, which has emerged as a leading contender.

Insiders say Clinton aides are looking at Brooklyn as a possible location, and that an office in White Plains, near the Clintons’s Chappaqua, N.Y., home, has been all but ruled out.  

{mosads}For months, some in the Clinton universe thought that setting up the campaign in or around White Plains, a middle-class enclave with dozens of office parks, would be a good home for the former secretary of State’s second presidential campaign. 

But using Brooklyn for its headquarters could be a useful symbol for a campaign that hopes to win over young people and has already been attacked by Republicans as “old news.”

The borough is New York City’s most populous, and has had a renaissance over the last decade as many of its neighborhoods have been transformed. It is also one of the most ethnically diverse areas of the United States — another aspect Clinton’s team will want to highlight as it seeks to attract minority voters.

It would provide a stark contrast from the locale where Clinton based her 2008 presidential campaign: the Washington, D.C., suburb of Ballston, Va. Back then, Team Clinton was housed in a stodgy former Immigration and Naturalization Service building. 

The former first lady has a personal office in midtown Manhattan, separate from the office space in midtown she has at the Clinton Foundation, where she has worked since leaving the State Department in 2013. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, also has a personal office in Harlem. 

Clinton is currently huddling with a small team of aides to craft plans for the 2016 campaign, including a potential start date for her bid. 

The would-be presidential campaign contender hasn’t yet reached a consensus on when exactly she’ll enter the race, but some insiders say it’s looking more and more likely that she’ll do a pre-launch in April to “get things going,” as one put it. 

Aides are still examining a formal start date in July, but a pre-launch could be spent fundraising and building out the campaign staff, some Clinton allies say. 

The allies say a soft rollout makes sense for Clinton because it would be difficult for her to remain on the sidelines for the next five months. Taking an initial and informal step, which wouldn’t have to be accompanied by the traditional bells and whistles, would bring a sense of closure to the will-she-or-won’t-she phase while giving her some breathing room to prepare for the next steps on both the policy and politics fronts. 

“I think the preference would be to wait longer so that she’s not firing on all cylinders until July,” one ally said. “I think that time would be used to continue making a lot of decisions with less time on the road. That piece of it wouldn’t really come until 3rd quarter.”

Ready for Hillary, the super-PAC created to lure Clinton into the race two years ago, will begin to shut down as soon as Clinton forms any kind of exploratory committee or pre-launch. Donors to the political action committee have been told in private conversations that the outside organization would not compete with Clinton for money and would start to wrap up work as soon as she indicated she would be entering the race.