Let us stipulate a few things at the start. Hillary Rodham Clinton is still odds-on to be the next president of the United States. Only George H.W. Bush among modern presidents had anything close to her CV, and he never was a senator from a major state. She has been the victim of incredible abuse and the subject of fantastical lies ever since she first stepped onto the public stage in Arkansas. She is as tough and durable a political figure as any we've seen with the possible exception of the guy she married and the guy that has the job now. Electing a woman to be president of the United States is a genuinely big honking historic deal. Electing this particular woman president of the United States is the only sane and plausible choice available.

OK? Fine.

I would also stipulate the following—as a presidential candidate, as a seeker of votes, as an applicant for the world's most powerful temp position, for the second time in a row, she's proving to be something of a mediocrity. I realize that the results last night in West Virginia will not mean very much down the road. They are products of skewed demographics and the playfulness of a number of voters who would not vote Democratic in the fall if you paid them in gold to do so. I realize that a large part of the difference between her winning margin in 2008 and her losing margin Tuesday night can precisely be measured as the difference between running against the "black guy" and having worked for the "black guy." I also realize that she only lost the delegate count to Bernie Sanders 16-11, which does little to slow her grim and inexorable march to the podium in Philadelphia this summer. But, dear god, she really leaves West Virginia with a very clean clock.

If this year has proven anything, it's that any Democrat that gets in the race against He, Trump is going to have to run a campaign that is both razor-sharp and incredibly dexterous. After all, you are running against a walking fiction, a performance piece that has had a longer run than anyone could have anticipated. You're not running against a human being. If you were, the human being that is He, Trump would have been out of the race before Scott Walker was. Instead, you are running against the idea of Trump, against the walking representation of the desire of many angry white people to hock a loogie at the system and then walk away, high-fiving and bro-hugging their way to glory. It is the height of understatement to call what He, Trump is doing "unconventional." Jerry Brown was "unconventional." Hell, Ben Carson was "unconventional." He, Trump is something far beyond that.

It is the height of understatement to call what He, Trump is doing "unconventional."

HRC is a plodder. There's nothing wrong with that. Many great politicians have been plodders; it can be argued that—his ability to galvanize an audience aside—the current president is something of a plodder. What is what he memorably called "the hard, necessary work of self-government" in his acceptance speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, if not an appeal for people to understand that progress does not come like thunderclaps and lightning. But the problem, as I see it, anyway, is the problem of horses-for-courses. A pure plodder is not the best candidate to put in a race against someone who is completely unmoored from consequence, who makes up policy positions on the fly, an improv act for whom the truth is whatever he decides to say next. Against this, HRC can look slow and stolid.

I have heard her speak a couple of dozen times over the last six months. Outside of the "Deal Me In" riff, which is a good one, I can't give you a single memorable line from any of her speeches. They always begin strongly and then devolve into an endless litany of policy prescriptions. Don't get me wrong. They're good policy prescriptions. I agree with most of them. (My primary doubt about a President HRC is her career hawkishness.) Recently, she's even flirting with a single-payer, Medicare-for-all healthcare system. (Thanks, Bernie!) They usually draw respectable applause. And, 10 minutes after the event is over, you don't remember a single one of them.

What is that matched against a big beautiful wall that Mexico is going to pay for?

What is that matched against Making America Great Again?

Chip Somodevilla Getty Images

He, Trump is running a very different, and a very shrewd, campaign. He allows his audience to assume he's the smartest guy in the room while telling them how smart they are for realizing that. He is making a kind of intellectual appeal to their emotions. It is going to take a kind of political genius to counter that, day after day, for the next six months. It is going to take the ability to match He, Trump head-fake for head-fake so as to make him pay for the approximately 9,768 policy reversals he's going to undertake between now and election day. It's also going to take a massive amount of money, which is the one thing about which I'm fairly sanguine when it comes to the HRC general election campaign.

At the moment, I don't see the Clinton campaign as being quick enough on its feet to do what it needs to do. ("Dangerous Donald"? Really?) Right now, it can't put away Bernie Sanders, who is the most predictable candidate ever to stand in two shoes. Running as a serious candidate against a rodeo clown is always going to be a struggle. Running as a potential president against a guy who believes that the country can simply walk away from its financial obligations, and that he can, through his own inherent genius, get Mexico to pay for a wall, requires that you walk a fine line between being serious and appearing pedantic. If she'd ever in her life shown any gift for mockery and ridicule, I'd feel a lot better about HRC as a candidate in this election against this opponent. Sometimes, you just have to throw long.

Click here to respond to this post on the official Esquire Politics Facebook page.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io