Some interesting points made here.
"She was a horrible candidate". Maybe some of the perception regarding Hillary is due to our perception of how thoroughly horrible Trump is, and we're judging her relative to that. ie: "she was up against the worst person in the world and she lost, so she has to be the worst of everything ever..."
Plenty of "bad candidates" have been in office for some very long stretches of time.
New York Magazine:
Affection for her campaign staff is one reason Clinton claims she will not point fingers at her own team in assessing her loss. “I will never say anything other than positive things about my campaign,” she tells me in Chappaqua. “Because I love the people that led it, worked in it.”
Besides, she argues, “what I was doing was working. I would have won had I not been subjected to the unprecedented attacks by Comey and the Russians, aided and abetted by the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin.” She agrees that there are lessons to be learned from her campaign, just not the same ones her critics would cite. “Whoever comes next, this is not going to end. Republicans learned that if you suppress votes you win … So take me out of the equation as a candidate. You know, I’m not running for anything. Put me into the equation as somebody who has lived the lessons that people who care about this country should probably pay attention to.”
--and--
She was still in the ritualistic-process mode when she attended Trump’s inauguration. People close to her told me that she’d had doubts about being able to make it through without visibly losing control. “Oh,” says Clinton, “it was hard. It was really … difficult.” But “at the time, we hoped that there would be a different agenda for governing than there had been for running.”
Of course, it quickly became clear from Trump’s speech that there would be no change in strategy. A look of disgust crosses Clinton’s face as she recalls it. “It was a really painful cry to his hard-core supporters that he wasn’t changing,” she says. “The ‘carnage’ in our country? It was a very disturbing moment. I caught Michelle Obama’s eye, like, What is going on here? I was sitting next to George and Laura Bush, and we have our political differences, but this was beyond any experience any of us had ever had.”
I ask her about the report that Bush had said of the speech, “That was some weird shit,” and her eyes light up. “Put it in your article,” she says. “They tried to walk back from it, but …” Did she hear it herself? I ask. She raises her eyebrows and grins.
The unusually prolonged pummeling is partly because Clinton’s Election Day loss was not just hers but the nation’s; her defeat this time left us not with an Obama presidency but with an out-of-control administration led by a man so inept — and so reviled — that even (some) Republicans are voicing concerns. The nation is grasping for a way to understand how we got here, and blaming Clinton wholly and neatly takes the heat off everyone else who contributed: from the critics who derided her supporters as empty-headed shills to those supporters who were cowed into secret Facebook groups; from the journalists who treated Trump as a ratings-pumping sideshow and Clinton as the suspiciously presumptive president to all of us who permitted cheerful stories about America’s progress on gender and race to blot out the real and lingering inequities in this country.
