In the 1950s, when Mary Martin was a reigning star on Broadway, with a chauffeured Rolls-Royce and a wardrobe full of Mainbocher gowns, her friends and co-stars would marvel that she could still channel the little girl from Weatherford, Texas, she once had been to convincingly play hometown heroines like Ensign Nellie Forbush in South Pacific. She did it by summoning something deep inside her. Hillary never mastered the trick.

And unlike Bill Clinton, whose Arkansas roots were always as plain as the plangent southern twang the world came to know, Hillary’s core was never so clear to begin with. Was she a liberal or a pragmatist? A free trader or a newly minted protectionist? A Cubs fan or a Mets fan? Who could say? Certainly not she.

Since leaving the White House 16 years ago, Bill Clinton himself has palled around mostly with millionaires and billionaires (some less savory than others). He blended dubious personal business interests with the worthy charitable endeavors of his foundation (work that, paradoxically, will now be easier for him to continue than if he had been First Laddie). Together with his wife, he earned as much as $230 million in speaking and consulting fees and other income. He may also have lost a step or two with age.

Yet he was in touch enough with his roots and his old mojo to press his wife’s campaign team this year to reach out to the disaffected white rural and working-class voters who were flocking to her opponent, Donald Trump, in droves. The aides variously dismissed that idea as ineffective, unnecessary, or impossible, and she lost Pennsylvania by a single percentage point.

There were other problems, many of them of Hillary Clinton’s own making: for instance, her decision as secretary of state to use a private e-mail server, and her persistent tendency to shade the truth about why she had done so. Or her lucrative speeches to Goldman Sachs. Or her limitations as a candidate on the stump.

Some factors were beyond Clinton’s control, including an economy with stubbornly slow growth in jobs and income; rising health-insurance premiums; and the still-powerful sexism that has made it hard to elect female chief executives around the world in countries without parliamentary systems, in which leaders are chosen by their peers, not the voters at large.

But the overriding problem was Clinton’s lack of any message as clear and disciplined as her husband’s was in 1992, when James Carville’s scrawled whiteboard mantra at campaign headquarters in Little Rock read, “Change vs. more or the same; The economy, stupid; Don’t forget health care.” When I asked a long-serving Clinton aide this week if there was anything she could have done to keep from losing, he replied without missing a beat, “Sure: give people a reason to vote for her.”

It is a mark of Clinton’s failure as a candidate that she lost to the only Republican—Donald Trump—that even most Democrats thought she had a strong chance of beating. The depth of her grief and regret must be profound. It was certainly etched on the ashen faces of her loyal aides and supporters in the Wyndham New Yorker Hotel ballroom where she made her concession speech on Wednesday.

Clinton can blame the media for blowing her flaws out of proportion (and it did). She can blame advisers whose reliance on big data proved flawed (and it was). She can blame F.B.I. irector James Comey, whose puzzling 11th-hour stink bomb about her e-mails broke all decorum, bled wavering supporters away from her, and was only topped by his midnight “Never mind!” She can blame fearful voters (and we now know there were tens of millions of them) who saw in Trump’s easy promises and simple slogan the reassurance they craved.