"How to Beat Hillary ... How to Back Hillary Into a Corner: A report from the secret race to answer 2016's most pressing question,"

Hillary Clinton is featured on the cover of the November-December 2014 issue of Politico. From the piece written by  Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush:

One afternoon in late September, David Plouffe ... slipped into Hillary Clinton's stately red-brick home on Whitehaven Street ... to lay out his vision for her 2016 presidential campaign. The Clintons have always made a habit of courting their most talented tormenters, so it wasn't surprising that she would call on the man who masterminded her 2008 defeat as she finds herself besieged by Republicans replaying Plouffe's greatest hits. Over the next couple of hours, Plouffe told Clinton and two of her closest advisers-longtime aide Cheryl Mills and John Podesta, Bill Clinton's chief of staff and now Obama's White House counselor-what she needed to do to avoid another surprise upset.

His advice ... looked a lot like Obama's winning strategy in 2012: First, prioritize the use of real-time analytics, integrating data into every facet of her operation in a way Clinton's clumsy, old-school campaign had failed to do in 2008. Second, clearly define a rationale for her candidacy that goes beyond the mere facts of her celebrity and presumed electability, rooting her campaign in a larger Democratic mission of economic equality. Third, settle on one, and only one, core messaging strategy and stick with it, to avoid the tactical, news cycle-driven approach that Plouffe had exploited so skillfully against her in the 2008 primaries...

Framing an effective anti-Hillary campaign is, in many ways, as complex a challenge as Clinton faces in establishing a rationale for her candidacy. For starters, the sheer volume of information on Clinton serves as a kind of political vaccine (of limited effectiveness, to be sure) against future attacks. So much is already known about Clinton, or presumed to be known, that even genuinely new revelations—like adoring, 1970s-vintage Clinton letters to Saul Alinsky, the leftist father of modern community organizing—or an audiotape unearthed by the Free Beacon of mid-1970s Clinton chuckling about the guilt of a rape suspect she defended—haven’t had a major impact, at least not yet. (“I had him take a polygraph, which he passed—which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs,” she says on the tape, laughing.)

It’s easy to dismiss, as many Democrats do, these early probing attacks as old news. But the drip-drip of rumor and punditry is turning into a steadier flow of potentially damaging revelations. And GOP operatives tell us they are rooting around for silver bullets in all the expected places, from the Benghazi killings to her lucrative speaking engagements and the family’s complex financial dealings...

Democrats, especially those who watched her lurch from crisis to crisis in the 2008 race, worry that it’s not the attacks but her tendency to diverge from her own message and strategic imperatives that could prove her undoing—one of the points Plouffe gently delivered during last month’s meeting in the Georgian serenity of Whitehaven.

“You can get in her head,” a former Obama staffer who worked on opposition research against Clinton in 2008 told us.