US election season blooms early

President Barack Obama is openly joking about Hillary Clinton succeeding him, House Republicans are agitating over Benghazi and Monica Lewinsky is back.

In other words, 2016 is on.

The next US presidential election has already begun, although the Iowa caucuses are still 18 months away. Looking past congressional races in November, the political world in Washington has fixed its gaze on the White House contest in a way that it had not fully done before this week.

The clearest target this week was Clinton - an undeclared candidate who nonetheless is emerging as the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. Republicans used growing US interest in the fate of more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria to develop a fresh line of attack against her, taking her to task for failing to designate Boko Haram as a terrorist organisation while she was secretary of state.

Coupled with that criticism, House lawmakers voted on May 8 to create a select committee to investigate the 2012 attacks that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya - an episode that Clinton has described as the "biggest regret" of her tenure as the top US diplomat.

"It is kind of spring training for 2016," said Ryan Williams, a veteran Republican operative with the Washington-based FP1 Strategies. "There is a sense among Republicans that we need to try out what works against her and what doesn't, and soften up her approval numbers going into 2016."

Adding to the fire is this month's edition of Vanity Fair, which features an essay by Lewinsky, whose affair with former president Bill Clinton led to his impeachment in 1998.

For more than a decade, the presidential paramour had kept silent about the scandal. In the essay, Lewinsky takes aim at Hillary Clinton for "lashing out" at her. "I find her impulse to blame the Woman - not only me, but herself - troubling," writes Lewinsky.

Even Obama has acknowledged the role Clinton will play in the contest to succeed him.

At the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington on May 3, he cited her in a joke about how conservatives - including the Fox News network - will have to stop taking swings at his African heritage. "Let's face it, Fox, you'll miss me when I'm gone," said Obama. "It will be harder to convince the American people that Hillary was born in Kenya."