“YOU and everyone you know probably despise Hillary Clinton. There's almost nothing about her that appeals to you. You think she stayed in her marriage because she was hungry for unelected power, and that disgusts you.” And so on. The quote is from “Can She Be Stopped?”, a polemic by John Podhoretz, a conservative columnist. It says something about the polarisation of American life that an author can assume not only that his readers hate Hillary (a fair bet, given the book's title and scary cover photo) but also that they don't know anyone who doesn't. Mrs Clinton would doubtless dismiss Mr Podhoretz as part of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. But he is not alone in disliking her. Polls suggest that between 40% and 50% of Americans have an unfavourable view of the junior senator from New York. They are a vast obstacle to Mrs Clinton's presidential ambitions.

Why do people detest her? Let Lexington count the ways. First, and most obviously, conservatives cannot stand her. They see her, as Bay Buchanan (Pat's sister) put it in another recent Hillary-bashing book, as an “ardent feminist, anti-war activist and student radical” who “did not leave her passion for all things liberal behind on the campuses of Wellesley and Yale”. The Hillary of conservative demonology is practically a socialist. (Well, she did try to put the government in charge of health care.) She is anti-family. (She once wrote an essay about children's rights which few have read but many believe argues that children should be allowed to sue their parents. It does not.) She is a standard-bearer for the counter-culture of the 1960s. (As a student, she gave a speech endorsing “freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality” and “more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living”.) And she thinks abortion should be legal.

Second, and more surprisingly, many on the left loathe her too. The anti-war crowd resents her for voting to allow the use of force in Iraq. Plenty of other Democrats voted the same way. But Barack Obama did not and John Edwards, who did, has apologised. Mrs Clinton refuses to. This infuriates the likes of Code Pink, an anti-war group whose members pursue her with chants of “It takes one bomb to raze a village” and “You were first lady and now you're least/ Get the US out of the Middle East.”

Many ardent feminists also abhor Mrs Clinton. In These Times, a left-wing magazine, published an essay in April entitled “Why Women Hate Hillary”, arguing that in her determination to appear as ruthless and macho as her male rivals, she has betrayed the women's movement. The Nation, another lefty periodical, recently ran a cover story arguing that while many women approve of Mrs Clinton, a lot of feminists think she is “a ventriloquist for the patriarchy”, in the words of Jane Fonda, an actress.

The anti-Hillary jibes of left and right cannot all be true. For all her talents, Mrs Clinton cannot be a warmonger and a peacenik, or a radical feminist and a shill for the patriarchy. Perhaps if extremists of both left and right detest her, she must in fact be a nice, reasonable moderate. There is something to this. Since the debacle of Hillarycare, and especially since she joined the Senate in 2001, she has eschewed radicalism in favour of cautious, incremental steps to improve health care, the environment and national security. But it is not only her policies that people dislike, nor is it only extremists who dislike her.

For many, it is Mrs Clinton's personality that grates. Her supporters say that many men cannot abide an ambitious woman, and that is doubtless true. But there are also plenty of unbigoted Americans who believe that Mrs Clinton will say or do anything to win power. She put up with her husband's constant philandering and branded as liars women she knew were telling the truth about him. She supports causes many doubt she really cares about (such as banning flag-burning) and publicly opposes some she may privately believe in (such as gay marriage). She can be abrasive: she threatened to “demonise” Democratic congressmen who quibbled about her health-care plan. She can be extraordinarily self-righteous. Dick Morris, an adviser-turned-foe, claims he once advised her to admit to a personal flaw to make herself seem more human. He says she could not think of one. And she has what Carl Bernstein, a somewhat sympathetic biographer, describes as “a difficult relationship with the truth”.

Disliked, but still most likely

Yet none of this means her presidential bid is doomed. Far from it. Mrs Clinton may not be the most likeable of candidates, but she has enormous strengths. She has learned from past mistakes, even if she has not admitted them. She has a prodigious memory, a bottomless capacity for hard work and a quarter-century of experience of national politics. In debates, her grasp of policy makes her Democratic rivals look callow or shallow. Her campaign organisation is second to none. She can borrow credit for the peace and prosperity of the first Clinton era. And whatever Ms Fonda would prefer, she gets a huge boost from women who want to see one of their own in the White House. In part because there are more female Democrats than black ones, she leads Mr Obama by double digits in polls of likely primary voters.

Winning the general election will be harder, though. Americans tell pollsters they would rather elect a Democrat than a Republican, but when asked to choose between Mrs Clinton and the Republican front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, they usually prefer him. Whereas Mrs Clinton's Democratic rivals are reluctant to attack her personally—Mr Obama apologised this week for a mild slur from an aide—Republicans will take their gloves off.

But as the publication this month of two exhaustive new biographies showed, there is little fresh dirt to dig up on Mrs Clinton. And since Americans have already heard the worst, her negative ratings may already have hit a ceiling, which is probably not true of any other candidate.