Hillary Clinton's 2016 message: Obama's been good. I'll be better.

President Obama's 2008 presidential campaign rested on the promise of hope and change. And as Hillary Clinton finally dropped the charade and entered the 2016 race on Sunday with a campaign announcement video, her underlying message appeared to be not that same starry-eyed yearning, but a more guarded form of optimism built on the promising gains of the Obama years.

Over at The Washington Post, Greg Sargent digs into that a bit more, arguing the former secretary of state believes "swing voters and independents don't see the Obama years as quite the smoking apocalyptic hellscape Republicans continue to describe."

To be sure, Clinton can't break too dramatically from Obama given their overlapping ideologies and her tenure in Obama's State Department. But Sargent makes a convincing case Clinton's team believes the GOP will overreach to define Obama as a failure, and voters, seeing the gains of the past eight years, will opt for four more years of the same.

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