Indira A.R. Lakshmanan covered foreign policy and politics for Bloomberg News for the past eight years, traveling with Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry and on the 2008 campaign. She has covered domestic politics and international relations for 25 years and reported from more than 80 countries.

Hillary Clinton knows her biggest weakness as a candidate is that she’s not much of one. She works hard at it, but she’s not in her element doing the things that presidential contenders need to do: performing in arenas, charming the media, electrifying the masses. “I’m not a natural politician,” Clinton confessed at a recent debate. “In case you haven’t noticed.”

People have noticed. Bernie Sanders, who does know how to fire up a crowd, has won seven of the past eight states and is looking for a dramatic primary upset in his native New York on Tuesday. Like the golden-tongued newcomer named Barack Obama who took Clinton by surprise eight years ago, Sanders’ shockingly successful insurgency is a nagging reminder of Clinton’s vulnerability as a campaigner. And it’s plainly on her mind. At a recent town hall, Clinton spoke admiringly, even wistfully, of two guys who had millions in their thrall with their rhetorical flourish and knack for engaging ordinary folk. “I watched my husband campaign, I watched President Obama campaign – it is poetry … That’s not necessarily my forte,’’ she confessed.


What is her strong suit, Clinton says, is the nitty-gritty prose of governance. That’s when she truly finds herself. “I’m much better when I actually have a job to do, rather than trying to get the job, you know?’’ she said at the town hall. In a recent interview, she elaborated on the point, saying her effectiveness translates into likability: “When I have a position, whether it's first lady or senator or secretary of state and I'm doing the work, I'm really quite popular,” she said, citing high approval ratings as secretary. Her pitch boils down to a trust fall for American voters: You might not see it now, but if you elect me, I’ll be the president who inspires you with what I get done.

Can she really sell that to the American people? Over the past nine years I’ve had a unique vantage point on this question. Covering her for Bloomberg News, I traveled with her both on her last campaign and as secretary of state. In 2007 and 2008, I trailed Candidate Clinton from Iowa to Kentucky, watching her bristle at questions and struggle to inspire crowds. I was standing a few feet from her when she let down her guard in a rare moment, her voice cracking and tears welling in her eyes at a New Hampshire coffee shop. After the election, I was the only writer from that pack who joined the much-smaller State Department press corps, and traveled regularly on her plane for the next four years, from her first overseas trip to Asia to her last stop in Belfast.

Watching her on those two different stages, the contrast between the two Hillarys was stunning. Up close, it felt like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. From the start of her first trip as secretary of state in February 2009, I was struck by how different she seemed from the presidential candidate she had been only several months before. Clinton was relaxed, at ease with the press and radiating charisma in front of crowds. In Indonesia, thousands of people crammed into a Jakarta slum, all wanting to touch her or catch a glimpse as she greeted new mothers at a maternal health clinic. A member of her American security detail joked privately that if she’d gotten this kind of reception at home, the U.S. election might have turned out differently. When I asked a couple of bystanders why they’d waited hours for a glimpse of a U.S. Cabinet secretary, they looked at me as if I were a moron: “She’s the most famous and powerful woman in the world. Who wouldn’t want to see her?”

She also played the crowds like a natural. I still chuckle at a moment in her second overseas town hall that same trip when a young woman at Ewha Womans University in Seoul asked breathlessly: “I have a question related to love … How did you know your husband was … ” The end of her question was at first inaudible, and for a split second, the American reporters and aides held their breath, wondering at the implication. But the student had asked how Clinton knew her husband was the right one for her, and Clinton exclaimed with a girlish laugh that she felt “more like an advice columnist than like the secretary of state today.” She then launched into an impromptu meditation on love, describing her husband as her best friend and their marriage as “an endless conversation.” She quoted a close friend who told her at the end of her life, “I’ve loved and been loved, and all the rest is background music.” The Korean students cheered her answer, and I was struck that it felt so much more personal and revelatory than almost any moment in Clinton’s campaign.

What happened to the Candidate Clinton who was stiff, defensive and off-putting? Her doppelganger, Secretary Hillary, seemed to have shed a mask. It wasn’t just that Clinton was good at policy stuff as secretary of state; she actually came alive on the job—meeting people and connecting with their problems, making speeches and working crowds. For those four years, she earned consistently high approval ratings from the American public and won praise from the same Senate Republicans who rail against her now. Setting aside judgments about ideology and policy, achievements or failures, it’s striking that the personal political skills that were obscured in her previous campaign—charisma and an ability to connect with and persuade people—were Clinton’s tools of the trade when she traveled as Obama’s envoy to win over votes in support of U.S. foreign policy.

Clearly, however, something seems to happen to Clinton when the task is asking people to vote for her. One can pop-psychologize: Maybe it’s a byproduct of a self-effacing Midwestern Methodist upbringing, or a fear of failure and a defensive instinct instilled by a father who was demanding and hypercritical. David Axelrod, who as chief strategist for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign studied her vulnerabilities as a candidate, has his own theory: Campaigns for president, unlike those for senator, demand a level of “revelation about yourself, about who you are as a person, and she’s very cautious about that. Part of it is she’s been beaten up for a long time and that accentuates her fear of making a mistake.”

She’s hardly the first candidate to be reticent about her personal side. George H.W. Bush, also a very reserved person, was a less-than inspiring campaigner but a largely effective leader, especially in foreign policy. Likewise, Lyndon B. Johnson was “at best a prosaic campaigner,” but used skills honed over years in Congress to pass transformational new laws, presidential historian Michael Beschloss told me.

This year, Clinton’s lead in the 2016 primaries and caucuses suggests she’s studied what she did wrong in her last race. She’s made an effort this time to open up to voters in a way that Americans crave from their leaders—referring to her faith, to obstacles women face, to her mother’s influence in her life, to problems in her marriage, and appearing on comedy shows early in the campaign to showcase her humorous side.

Hillary Clinton during a famously revealing moment, tearing up at a New Hampshire coffee shop during the 2008 primary in January. | AP

But Sanders’ 12-point win over Clinton in Wyoming, following his strong showing elsewhere in the past several contests, is an indicator that for many voters, Clinton is still not catching fire. That’s a warning sign ahead of New York’s primary, which Clinton needs to win decisively to halt Sanders’ momentum, and it’s a red flag for the general election.

If she secures the Democratic nomination as expected, her weaknesses as a political performer will be even more pronounced if she’s pitted against a Republican front-runner who compensates for what he lacks in governing expertise by thrilling crowds with a no-holds-barred, reality-TV intensity. If Clinton the candidate is a guarded policy wonk who lacks an electrifying public persona, Donald Trump is her photo negative. The general election will put her weakest quality as a politician to its hardest test yet.

***

Covering Hillary Clinton in 2008 wasn’t the happiest assignment for a reporter. News conferences were few and tense, and it’s hard to remember an off-the-record or candid conversation she had with campaign reporters. Burned by years of critical coverage dating back to her husband’s run in 1992, she and her staff seemed to dislike and distrust the press, rarely venturing to the back of her plane to chat. Some of her key advisers were unhelpful, even downright hostile.

Her unhappy history with Republican attacks and media coverage of controversies from Whitewater to Monica Lewinsky was an understandable explanation for her defensive posture. But it translated into a reluctance to go off-script and expose herself to the public, which made for a strained relationship with voters as well. As she traveled from Iowa to New Hampshire to the Super Tuesday states, her speeches often felt dry and canned. Facing off against the historic candidacy of a gifted African-American orator, she talked policy and neglected inspiration. She downplayed the historic nature of her own candidacy as a woman, stressing toughness and readiness when Americans wanted something new. Young people and minorities flocked to the change that Obama represented.

At campaign stops, voters pressed her over her support as a senator for the ill-fated military intervention in Iraq. Instead of disavowing her vote like her early rival John Edwards did, she defended it, turning off a large segment of Democrats. She also exuded hubris, which didn’t help; she told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in an interview before Iowa caucused that she would have the nomination in the bag by February 5.

In her campaign’s view, the media bore much of the blame for focusing on gotcha moments instead of substantive issues, and her aides frequently complained that the press was much harder on her than on Obama. They were right about that, though it may have been partly because of her poor relationship with the press and partly that she had a longer record to dissect. Yet if she had won over enough voters, critical coverage would hardly have mattered. Consider Trump: The candidate and his campaign are criticized and mocked daily by the media, but he continues to electrify his base and dominate the Republican race.

A rare departure from Clinton’s typical stiff stump speech came in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in 2008, when she was trailing Obama in polls after his upset victory in Iowa. She had come face-to-face with vicious misogyny in New Hampshire that week, where detractors had crashed her rallies, heckling and holding hand-made signs with the slogans “Iron My Shirt!” and “Beat the B***h.” Not long after one of these ugly outbursts, Clinton was meeting a small group of undecided voters at Café Espresso; I was wedged next to a camera a few feet away. A woman asked Clinton how she managed to get out of bed every day and keep going under the pressure, doing things as mundane as making her hair look good. As I watched Clinton’s face, it was obvious the personal question, coming at that moment, touched a nerve.

Clinton looked composed as always, with her short hairstyle perfectly in place and blue eye shadow matching her suit. Then something happened. “It’s not easy … and I couldn’t do it if I didn’t just, you know, passionately believe it was the right thing to do,” she began, choking briefly as tears seemed to well in her eyes. The 16 coffeehouse patrons applauded, encouraging her to go on. “This is very personal for me. It’s not just political ... I see what’s happening and we have to reverse it,” she continued, picking up steam. “Some of us put ourselves out there and do this against some pretty difficult odds,” she said, her voice cracking again, “and we do it each one of us because we care about our country.” By the time she finished, several of the undecided women voters were wiping their eyes.

I remember calling my editor as soon as the event ended, excitedly telling him Clinton had gotten emotional and welled up on national TV and it was bound to move the needle, though I wasn’t sure in which direction. He quizzed me: Was it a campaign-ending Edmund Muskie moment, was it a tearful goodbye like Pat Schroeder’s? No, it was as if she pulled back a curtain and let people see what motivated her. Was it real or an act, my editor wanted to know. I knew by then Clinton was no great performer. From a few feet away, the emotion seemed very genuine. Bill Clinton credited that moment with humanizing his wife, underscoring her passion; it helped vault her from behind to win the New Hampshire primary.

So if her passion is real, why can’t Clinton harness it to win more votes when she needs to? That contrast between public and private personas is unusual among recent American leaders. Nixon was awkward and uncomfortable no matter what he did in public life; the campaigner wasn’t far from his character as president. Reagan and Eisenhower were an exception; they had sunny, prepossessing public images, but were said to be aloof in private. Clinton is almost the reverse. Even longtime Clinton confidants, including more than half a dozen interviewed for this story, bemoan that the warm and caring woman they know in person can come off on the stump as someone else entirely.

Axelrod, who has known Clinton since 1992, finds her “very warm and very genuine” in person, a far cry from the sometimes robotic candidate of 2008. As first lady, Clinton helped raise funds for an epilepsy foundation started by Axelrod’s wife, spending hours meeting affected children and speaking with visible emotion about the terror they must feel during seizures. She connected with the children individually, including “my own daughter, who was highly medicated and hard to talk to,” Axelrod recalled. Afterward, Clinton worked hard on a push to find a cure for epilepsy. “That’s who she is,” Axelrod said. “But when she’s running, for whatever reason, there’s not a comfort level in being who she is. She tends to become very tactical and guarded, and it’s hard to connect that way.”

I also have seen the thoughtful and caring side of Clinton firsthand. When my 4-year-old son relapsed with leukemia, I had to take leave from covering the State Department to be in the hospital for his long and difficult treatment. Clinton’s aides must have told her why I wasn’t on the plane, and one day a letter arrived, handwritten on a secretary of state notecard embossed with a gold eagle expressing her sadness, wishing my son well in his treatment and saying she was keeping us in her prayers. When my son was well enough, he sent a reply: a letter he dictated to me with a picture he made for her. She immediately wrote back and the two began a pen-pal relationship that culminated in an invitation to visit her at the State Department after his immune system was strong enough to go out in public. Before their meeting, she had clearly done her homework, asking aides about my son’s interests. He wanted to talk about endangered animals and protecting the environment. She delighted him with a packet of material from the department’s oceans and environment bureau, and regaled him with stories about seeing polar bears in the Arctic and her work on a climate change treaty. My story isn’t unique: Another journalist told me Clinton made a point of asking with sensitivity about his plans to adopt a child from an Indian orphanage she had visited. A former aide told me Clinton got involved in finding the best doctors for her daughter when she needed special treatment.

“When people say to me she’s stiff and calculating and I say that’s really not what she’s like, they look at me like I’m lying,” said James Carville, who was lead strategist for Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign and advised Hillary Clinton in 2008. “I can’t tell you the number of times that I hear that, and I really don’t know how you change it,” he said. It’s the same frustration many Clinton insiders express at the contradiction between the Hillary they know and the one the public perceives.

In a memorable moment from a 2008 debate, Clinton was asked directly why people didn’t “like her” as much as then-Senator Obama. With a demure smile and jokey delivery that made her as relatable as anyone who’s ever been told they’re not as popular as they’d wish, she began, “Well, that hurts my feelings … ” The audience in the New Hampshire auditorium laughed, momentarily disarmed, before her rival damned her with faint praise: “You’re likable enough, Hillary.”

Ironically, her popularity surged in late-voting states when she focused on down-and-out working people in the Rust Belt; when she talked about knowing what it was like to be “knocked down;” when she downed a shot of whiskey like an everyman in a crowded bar in Indiana. She had reversed roles from predestined winner to scrappy underdog, but by then, the nomination was lost.

Her best speech of the 2008 campaign was her last. “Well, this isn't exactly the party I'd planned, but I sure like the company,” she began in her concession speech to a hall full of roaring loyalists at the National Building Museum in Washington. She thanked supporters, like a 13-year-old girl who used money she’d saved for Disney World to go to Pennsylvania to volunteer for Clinton. “Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it, and the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time. That has always been the history of progress in America.”

South African jazz singer Judith Sephuma invites Clinton, then secretary of state, to dance with her to African music at a gala hosted by the country’s foreign minister, in 2012. | AP

She had finally embraced her feminist roots, citing suffragettes and civil rights activists and giving a heartfelt, goosebump-inducing performance that inspired the kind of passion many voters simply hadn’t felt during the campaign. But by then, it was too late.

***

Within a week after Obama’s election, Clinton accepted his offer to be secretary of state, and embarked on a four-year global charm offensive in which she promptly became everything that voters had decided she was not. When I traveled with her I discovered it wasn’t just in friendly environments like the Jakarta women’s health clinic where she seemed comfortable. In Libya in October 2011, Clinton—who had advocated for the NATO air campaign that helped oust Colonel Muammar Qadhaf—was swarmed by a terrifying-looking horde of rebels sporting bazookas and bandannas who had escorted her motorcade and now wanted pictures before she boarded her plane to leave. She gamely shook hands and smiled all round, posing at the center of a motley mob as they made V signs for victory, while her aides and the traveling press stared, slack-jawed, at the bizarre tableau of retail politics on a tarmac in Tripoli.

Even other foreign ministers seemed surprised by Clinton’s down-to-earth demeanor when they met her for the first time. I remember an awkward moment on her first trip to Beijing as secretary of state that she played to her advantage. As cameras clicked during their first handshake, a surprised-looking Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo blurted out that Clinton looked so much “younger and more beautiful than you look on TV!” Was this diplomatic flattery or a backhanded insult, I wondered. Clinton blushed momentarily but decided to milk the moment, replying with a slow, wide grin, “Well, we will get along very well.”

It was partly in jest, of course, since any relationship between U.S. and Chinese officials is strained from the start. But the rapport formed early with Dai was credited with helping sensitive negotiations during a dramatic return trip in 2012, when Clinton, by all accounts, played a critical role in persuading Chinese leaders to let a blind dissident who’d taken refuge in the U.S. Embassy to leave for the U.S.

Her most surprising and interesting public interactions came in moderated town hall forums she did on nearly every trip—her staff dubbed them “town-terviews”—in which she was interviewed by a prominent local journalist, and then opened herself up to questions about whatever was on the mind of students, democracy activists, civil society leaders or ordinary people in the audience. The questions were unscreened and unscripted and by no means all softballs; in Pakistan, Clinton was forced to defend U.S. policy to a cross-section of citizens outraged over civilian casualties blamed on U.S. drone strikes. U.S. policy isn’t beloved everywhere, but enthused, curious crowds gathered nearly everywhere she went as secretary, and she invariably drew applause. It’s just that the audience wasn’t made up of American voters.

Clinton also had a far better relationship with the State Department traveling press than she had with campaign reporters, though emails made public after she left office reflect a persistent sentiment in her office that she was being portrayed unfairly. When she was secretary, her frequent grilling by the press was just as tough as it had been with those who covered her presidential campaign in 2008, but it focused on world crises and policy decisions rather than on polls and personality, and she appeared to take the questions less personally. I called Nick Merrill, who’s worked with her in both roles, to ask what he thought was different. Merrill was a junior press aide on her last campaign, a liaison to the traveling press when she was secretary, and now is her traveling press secretary for 2016.

“You guys would ask her about Nagorno-Karabakh before you’d ask her about hair or makeup,” he joked. On the campaign trail, “reporters keep asking her about Trump” and “the horse race,” when what Clinton wants to talk about, Merrill said, is issues. “People see her seemingly dodge by going to policy and by not giving some emotive answer at the drop of a hat, it somehow gets viewed as disingenuousness or cold,” he said. “But it’s not—it’s the real Hillary Clinton. She tries to answer the question of why people should vote for her.”

As secretary, Clinton held regular off-the-record dinners or drinks on trips with the traveling State Department press—a group that averaged between eight and 16 reporters. She was relaxed and funny after hours, often candid and wry about the toughest challenges facing U.S. foreign policy. In one memorable visit to the back of the plane in 2012 to debrief the press on difficult meetings with a government that stubbornly refused to budge on a long-running problem, she launched into a comical, heavily-accented impersonation of the foreign minister who had spent the evening patronizingly mansplaining to her, “Heel-aree, let me tell you how the world works … ”

A different foreign minister from a friendly country who was clearly charmed by her recounted that leaders from other allied nations would squabble amongst themselves at group meetings until Clinton arrived, when—as he described it— she’d “show them why it was in their nations’ interests, and they’d all try to accommodate her.”

That was of course not always the case, as I discovered when I was the pool reporter for Clinton’s tour of an energy-saving building outside New Delhi in July 2009. After being shown water recycling and insulated glass, I was led, along with Clinton’s closest advisers, into a conference room where India’s environment minister instructed us all to take seats. Before anyone understood what was happening, the first sensitive U.S.-India climate negotiation of the Obama administration had begun—and they unknowingly were doing it with a reporter sitting in, because the Indians assumed I was a member of her staff. It was impossible to move, and I was suddenly getting a glimpse of diplomacy from the inside as a fly on the wall.

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh sternly lectured Clinton that India was among the lowest per-capita carbon emitters in the world, and given the U.S. track record for polluting wantonly while it industrialized, it would be hypocritical and unacceptable to expect India to adopt legally binding caps on its carbon emissions. Clinton listened respectfully, letting her host finish before attempting to turn his argument on its head. The United States had indeed developed by burning fossil fuels, she agreed, but its leaders now knew better because of the latest research on global climate change. The United States didn’t want its friends like India who were still developing to make the same mistakes Washington had, and thanks to new technologies, India had the opportunity to leapfrog over dirty development and become a world leader in green tech. The United States could help, she concluded.

Clinton didn’t convince him in that one conversation, but it was a deft and savvy effort to use skills practiced making deals in the U.S. Senate and her understanding of India’s self-image as a beacon for the global South to try to win over another country to a U.S. priority.

Five months later at a climate summit in Copenhagen, she and Obama burst in on a secret meeting among the Chinese, Indian and other developing world leaders to strategize against U.S. and European pressure. In her dramatic retelling, the president and she leveraged the element of surprise and expanded on why it was in emerging economies’ self-interest to cap emissions.

Eventually, Ramesh came on board with Clinton’s original pitch. India pledged to slow its emissions intensity following Copenhagen, and worked closely with the U.S. on a "bottom-up" agreement that set the stage for the Paris climate accord last December. The moves were not always popular in New Delhi, but India now boasts the biggest renewable energy targets in the world, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made climate action a centerpiece of his development platform.

Melanne Verveer, Clinton’s chief of staff when she was first lady and her ambassador for global women’s issues when Clinton was secretary of state, acknowledged it may be hard for the public to perceive Clinton’s “small ‘p’ political skills” that she wielded as a senator and as secretary to get things done. “Where there were governments with whom we had disagreements, her response was not to attack them publicly if there was a chance to win them over. Instead, she would put a spotlight on something that was making a difference in the country. She talked truth to power behind closed doors, and often was able to persuade,” because “she used her people-to-people skills,” Verveer said.

***

Those “small p” skills may be crucial for governing, but you need “big P” political skills to get elected. Clinton’s challenge is that in an election year that’s exposed widespread voter discontent over inequities, candidates like Sanders and Trump who let their own anger loose on stage have successfully tapped into voters’ emotions in a way that she has not. “Governing is about nuance. Campaigns are about directly communicating with people all the time. … Campaigns reward channeling people’s frustration and anger,” said Neera Tanden, who was policy director for Clinton’s 2008 campaign.

For Clinton, the disconnect between her ease with the nuances of governing and her discomfort with the performance required in campaigning seems to be deeply rooted. More than any candidate this season, she’s been stung by decades of personal and political attacks on her and her husband, and a series of scandals that, fairly or not, she sees as the work of her enemies. That may explain her wariness with the press, her hesitancy to expose herself to the public, the ill-chosen decision to use a private email server as secretary and her campaign’s efforts to control the message in a way that doesn’t always allow her to showcase her best self.

It’s also reasonable to ask if the difference in style between Clinton and every other presidential candidate isn’t related, at least partly, to the most obvious difference: gender. “The ways you’re supposed to talk as a candidate—‘I’m so great,’” like Trump does, “are more offensive coming from women than men,” says Deborah Tannen, the Georgetown University professor who has spent a career studying the difference between men’s and women’s speaking styles. “When women do it, it rubs people the wrong way. But when you’re tough, as a candidate is expected to be, people don’t like you because women aren’t expected to talk that way.” Conversely, when one’s authority is taken for granted, as Clinton’s was as secretary of state, that’s when women tend to be most comfortable and to excel in leadership roles.

It certainly helped that in her travels as secretary, audiences were usually polite and receptive to her message—more so than the average undecided American voter. “She does much better in a world where people take her seriously from the get-go—most of us do,” said Stuart Stevens, a Republican strategist and former senior adviser to Mitt Romney. “When you’re a candidate, you don’t get any respect—you’re graded next to John Edwards and Bernie Sanders. When you’re secretary of state, there’s a lot of respect you get as a given.”

So what does that contrast mean for Hillary the candidate in 2016—and more important, has she learned anything from all these experiences?

She’s clearly learning; she is more comfortable campaigning today than eight years ago. Watching her answer questions this time from undecided voters, like a rabbi in New Hampshire who challenged her to talk about her ego and motivation for running, she’s more willing to open up and seems to be enjoying the campaign more. She still does better on the rope line and in small settings than in large arenas.

But reporters trailing her this time tell me her wariness of the campaign press is back, as is her feeling of being under attack, over the events in Benghazi and her use of a private email server. Opportunities to interact with her are once again limited; she went nearly three months till March without holding a press availability, though she’s answering more shouted-out questions now, nudged perhaps by Sanders’ frequent media interactions.

Though it might seem counterintuitive, a strong challenge from Sanders might play into what I realized is one of Clinton’s clear strengths. A grit and passion emerged when Clinton became the underdog in 2008. Once she was no longer the presumptive nominee, she discarded some of the talking points supplied by advisers and embraced a more populist and progressive persona that appealed to the Democratic Party base. She also seemed more relatable when she was fighting from behind. She connected with voters, especially in depressed industrial and Appalachian states, telling them she knew what it was like to be “knocked down.”

Others have seen it too: Clinton becomes “a more accessible person” when she’s in jeopardy as a candidate, Axelrod said. “She throws caution to the wind and compels herself to take that next step and expose herself more. That vulnerability makes it easier for her to connect.”

As secretary of state too, Clinton was often at her best under pressure, negotiating off the cuff to free the Chinese activist who’d taken refuge in the U.S. Embassy and mediating, with then-Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, an end to the 2012 Hamas-Israel rocket war.

Now it’s clinch time against Sanders. Ultimately, Clinton’s weaknesses as a candidate may not matter as much if, as expected, she takes New York and goes on to the nomination. If she faces Trump in the general election, she’ll be campaigning against someone who polls worse than she does. The latest Associated Press-GfK poll last week found that while 55 percent of the country has a negative view of Clinton, that’s surpassed by the 69 percent of America that has a poor view of Trump.

Still, as Clinton has learned the hard way, it’s unwise to assume victory when voters are fickle and so much in an election depends on intangibles like inspiration and likability. Clinton is right that she performs better when she’s already got the job. But she needs to get the job first.