Hillary Clinton, a favorite GOP foil, plans discreet 2018 strategy

There was a long line for selfies with Hillary Clinton last week at a Georgetown soiree for Lanny Davis, a Clinton loyalist whose latest book blames former FBI director James B. Comey for her 2016 presidential defeat.

Clinton devotees — waiting patiently within earshot — speculated about her future. Maybe, one asked, she’d leave political winter behind and become President Trump’s foil? Another talked up a 2020 comeback.

Clinton smiled, but did not respond.

In the first electoral season since the stunning loss that extinguished her years-long drive for the presidency, Clinton, 70, has begun a discreet and low-profile reentry into the political fray.

Her emerging 2018 strategy, according to more than a dozen friends and advisers familiar with her plans, is to leverage the star power she retains in some Democratic circles on behalf of select candidates while remaining sufficiently below the radar to avoid becoming a useful target for Republicans seeking to rile up their base.

Most likely, they said, Clinton will attempt to help Democratic candidates who have a history of supporting her and her family, and expending her political capital in a number of the 23 congressional districts she won in 2016 but are now held by a Republican. Lending a hand to Democrats organizing at a grass-roots level is a priority, they added.

“She’s not going to be up front,” said Jaime Harrison, a former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party and an associate chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Harrison said Clinton told him in December that she was committed to turning out core blocs in the party, such as African Americans and Latinos. “She’s saying, ‘Listen, I’m no longer running but we need these groups to be strong and people to vote.’ ”

Within her orbit, there is an emphasis on Clinton moving cautiously rather than making headlines with a flurry of interviews and endorsements, as former vice president Joseph R. Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and others with White House ambitions are doing at this stage.

The former first lady, secretary of state and Democratic presidential nominee, who has been a polarizing political figure for a quarter century, has accepted that Trump and his allies on Fox News Channel will bring her up seemingly daily, almost as though she were president and mired in scandal, her friends and advisers say.