“I’ve done what I could in this space to avoid the subject of Hillary Clinton. I don’t want to be the perennial turd in the punchbowl,” Sullivan begins his column, then explains how he was compelled to write about Clinton after “a fawning, rapturous reception” for her at the recent Women in the World conference. Apropos of rumors that her daughter Chelsea is considering a political career, he laments “the hold this family still has on the Democratic Party—and on liberals in general.” He even mocks Michelle Goldberg, a liberal Slate columnist, for having the temerity to wonder how Clinton is doing after her crushing loss to Trump. He continues:

And everywhere you see not an excoriation of one of the worst campaigns in recent history, leading to the Trump nightmare, but an attempt to blame anyone or anything but Clinton herself for the epic fail. It wasn’t Clinton’s fault, we’re told. It never is. It was the voters’—those ungrateful, deplorable know-nothings! Their sexism defeated her (despite a majority of white women voting for Trump). A wave of misogyny defeated her (ditto). James Comey is to blame. Bernie Sanders’s campaign—because it highlighted her enmeshment with Wall Street, her brain-dead interventionism and her rapacious money-grubbing since she left the State Department—was the problem. Millennial feminists were guilty as well, for not seeing what an amazing crusader for their cause this candidate was. And this, of course, is how Clinton sees it as well: She wasn’t responsible for her own campaign—her staffers were.

Sullivan may be right that Clinton didn’t accept enough blame for losing. He’s certainly not alone in that opinion. Clinton’s culpability is the focus of a new book by reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, an excerpt of which Sullivan quoted in his column: “The blame belonged to her campaign team, she believed, for failing to hone her message, energize important constituencies, and take care of business in getting voters to the polls.” CNN’s Jake Tapper also recently said, “She doesn’t seem to have done enough introspection.... Putin didn’t tell you don’t go to Wisconsin, James Comey didn’t tell you [to] call one-quarter of the country ‘deplorable.’”

But in making his case that Clinton was a historically inept candidate, Sullivan focuses on her many advantages—claiming that everything was “stacked in her favor”—without wrestling with her deep disadvantages. Yes, she “had the backing of the entire Democratic establishment, including the president (his biggest mistake in eight years by far), and was even married to the last, popular Democratic president.” Her name recognition and fundraising prowess nearly cleared the Democratic field. And yet, Sullivan argues, she almost lost the primary to “an elderly, stopped-clock socialist.” Then, despite favorable demographics and a growing economy, she lost the general election to “a malevolent buffoon with no political experience.” “Whenever she gave a speech,” he adds, “you could hear the air sucking out of the room minutes after she started.”

There’s no doubt Clinton was stiff on the stump and must take responsibility for strategic errors such as campaigning in Arizona the week before the election (rather than focusing on unexpected battleground states like Michigan and Wisconsin). But even some of Clinton’s staunchest supporters aren’t blind to these failings: The day after Clinton’s loss, Goldberg called her “uncharismatic,” and a few days later New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister acknowledged that “Clinton was surely a flawed candidate”—the “bearer of way too much awkward baggage,” and “not a magnetic or inspiring speaker.” But, Traister added, “the argument that if Clinton had taken a firmer stand on trade, or spent more time in Green Bay, it would have mitigated the fact that 48 percent of voters chose a self-confessed sexual predator who was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, attempts to apply reason where there is only visceral incongruity.” That Trump “was a catastrophically awful” candidate—so obviously worse than Clinton—“is enough to make one wonder if she ever really had a chance.”