Over a mere four years, Hillary Clinton swung dramatically from the far right of the political spectrum to the far left. The only thing she was consistent about was her attraction to losers -- electorally speaking, that is.

Back in her teens and early college years, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee was a Republican. This is not a skeleton Clinton keeps hidden in her closet with her real medical records and her cache of classified emails. She talked openly about her Young Republican days in her 2003 autobiography, "Living History."

She was a proud "Goldwater girl, right down to my cowgirl outfit and straw cowboy hat emblazoned with the slogan 'AuH20,'" she wrote. Goldwater, of course, being Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, the iconic conservative who stormed to the GOP presidential nomination in 1964, when Hillary was 16 years old.

Instead of walking around with a battered copy of "The Catcher in the Rye" in her back pocket, Hillary Rodham carried a copy of Goldwater's "The Conscience of a Conservative."

"I liked Senator Goldwater because he was a rugged individualist who swam against the political tide," she wrote.

Her viewpoint would soon change, however. In 1965, she enrolled at Massachusetts' Wellesley College, far from Park Ridge, Illinois, her conservative hometown. Her transformation was underway.

During the next presidential campaign, Hillary found herself drawn to anti-Vietnam War Democrat Eugene McCarthy, who knocked President Lyndon Johnson out of the presidential race but failed to win the Democratic nomination. She also liked moderate Republican Nelson Rockefeller, whose bid for the GOP nomination failed.

"I think she struggled through this period between these two poles," Clinton biographer Carl Bernstein told the New York Times.

The struggle actually began when she was still in high school. In "A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton," Bernstein wrote that during the 1964 campaign, Hillary was sent to Chicago's south side to "check for voter registration fraud in minority neighborhoods ... knocking on doors in the slums to find out the registration status of voters whom the Goldwater campaign might be able to disqualify."

Goldwater opposed civil-rights legislation; the fewer African-Americans at the polls the better his chances of winning the election. But for Hillary, seeing "how thousands of poor black people lived" radically changed her perspective.

When she landed at Wellesley the following year, she joined the campus Young Republicans, but she was already moving to the left, questioning some of the beliefs she grew up with. The GOP's foot-dragging on civil rights ultimately alienated her from her parents' political party.

Hillary didn't have much success in politics during her high school and college years, picking candidates who came up short (Goldwater, McCarthy, Rockefeller) and coming up short herself. As a senior in high school she ran for class president and was easily defeated. In a personal letter from that time, she wrote that she ran "against several boys and lost, which did not surprise me but still hurt, especially because one of my opponents told me I was 'really stupid' if I thought a girl could be elected president."

By the time she graduated from Wellesley and moved on to law school at Yale, the whip-smart, ambitious young woman was identifying herself as a Democrat. Meeting Bill Clinton, a southern Democrat committed to civil rights, further convinced her that she was now with the party of the future.

"How did a nice Republican girl from Park Ridge go wrong?" she joked in 1992 when Bill ran for president.

But did she go wrong? Some lifelong Republicans consider her more Republican than this year's GOP nominee. On policy matters, Donald Trump is inconsistent and all over the map -- leftish on trade and to the right on taxes, for example. Stuart Stevens, a former strategist for George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, said in May that Trump "is a moron with no demonstrated ability to acquire information."

But Stevens said he still can't bring himself to vote for Clinton.

Worse yet for her, Republican partisans aren't the only ones who feel this way. One of the problems Hillary Clinton faces is that, to hard-core ideologues on both the right and the left, she's suspect.

"Her stint as a 'Goldwater Girl' wasn't just a young girl's desire to be with an 'in' crowd and have the cutest outfits," wrote a backer of progressive firebrand Bernie Sanders in February. She is fundamentally conservative, the Bernie Girl insisted, citing Clinton's support for NAFTA and her husband Bill's role in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era law that separated commercial banking and investment banking.

Conservatives, on the other hand, might believe Hillary is more Republican than Trump on foreign affairs and a few other issues, but they still view her as fundamentally liberal, her Goldwater Girl background notwithstanding. After all, she has been a dedicated Democrat for more than 40 years now and has consistently advocated for core Democratic ideals, such as health insurance for all.

"I would rather not have to vote for her," Republican former Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote in a private 2014 email, "although she is a friend I respect."

But however partisan Clinton's record and worldview are, she has never viewed herself as explicitly partisan. And she believes that's part of what makes her presidential timber. There was a time when national political leaders rejected the ideological extremes and sought common ground. Hillary's husband and even conservative hero Ronald Reagan successfully worked across the political aisle during their presidencies. Hillary Clinton wants to follow their lead.

The times, however, have changed.

-- Douglas Perry