Leave aside everything you know about Hillary Clinton. This is, I realize, a great deal. In a strange sense, she has achieved the feminist dream of being judged not as a woman first but as a person first; even though she’s a potentially historic female candidate, we know so much about her that it is almost impossible for her to be a Symbol not a Person.

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Leave this aside for a moment and consider the pitch she is making.

At her rallies across Iowa, Bill and Hillary Clinton are trying an odd one-two punch where he explains that she is a mature adult who can get things done. She has worked across the aisle! She can make things happen!

She’s a “sticker,” whatever that word means.

Then Hillary Clinton gets onstage and announces that the Republican candidates are all hideous ravening beasts who will tear everything down. She, on the contrary, will NOT tear it down. She will build on it IN AN INCREMENTAL FASHION, working hard WITHIN THE SYSTEM!

Do you begin to see the difficulty of selling this?

The excitement gap is like the thigh gap: Maybe it would stop being a thing if we decided not to talk about it so much? But it’s easy to see why it would exist.

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Here are a few highlights from the lineup for Saturday night’s Bernie Sanders rally, held simultaneously: Foster the People. Josh Hutcherson. Vampire Weekend.

Here are a few highlights from the Clinton rally: Bill Clinton. Chelsea Clinton. Hillary Clinton.

Here is Scott McNabb, a guest columnist in the Gazette (East Iowa’s Independent, Locally Owned Newspaper), describing Hillary Clinton: “has the ability to graciously receive heartfelt messages from middle-aged women who seem to identify deeply with her.” Talk about damning with oddly specific praise.

I know that there are millennials who are genuinely fired up for Hillary Clinton, but they have yet to make much of a dent in the campaign’s general vibe, which is very much Book Club (Bring Your Own Wine) or Child’s Ice Hockey Game.

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Go to a Bernie Sanders rally, and there are six bands and a team of comedians and the place is overflowing with college students with vibrantly colored hair. Go to a Clinton rally, and there are their mothers, trying but failing to groove to a playlist that seems to be designed for Moms Who Want To Sit In The Tub After A Hard Day And Drink Wine. The crowd looks like an open call for an Activia digestive yogurt commercial. There is one person standing and cheering wildly, and everyone else is attempting to make it clear that they are not with her.

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The chanting is limited. It’s hard to get a good chant going when your pitch is LET’S WORK WITHIN THE SYSTEM TO MAKE INCREMENTAL CHANGES! What do you shout? “Gradual Change!” “Hey It’s Better Than Nothing!” “Hey Hey! Ho Ho! These Things Don’t Happen Overnight, You Know!” “Baby steps!”

“Burn it down!” is easy. “Take A Systematic Approach To Build On Prior Successes In A Small But Meaningful Way, Working With Congress” is not.

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This is not a movement. This is whatever the opposite of a movement is. A settlement? If you are supposed to campaign in poetry and govern in prose, this campaign missed that memo.

The question becomes: Do you need to be a movement to win?

It isn’t that Hillary Clinton is incapable of getting fired up, or of getting people fired up. At Saturday night’s rally, she showed real passion on the subject of gun control. Most candidates who stand on one side or the other of the Second Amendment will say something like “AND WE WILL STOP GUN VIOLENCE” or “AND WE WILL MAKE SURE OUR VETERANS RETAIN THEIR RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS!” and the crowd cheers and it is left at that. But when Hillary Clinton talks about gun control, she starts to wade into the specifics of “smart” guns and the potential for decreasing accidents and — where in this do you cheer?

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There’s a second problem, which is that the Old Machines are all not working. Bernie Sanders and President Obama before him both feel like “found” candidates, spread by word-of-mouth and excitement across social media. You had the hipster illusion of having discovered this Cool New Territory yourself.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, is McDonald’s. There’s no discovery involved. She is what the machine is trying to hand you. She’s Top 40. She is your mom coming home and asking “Have you heard this great song ‘Happy’?”

It makes sense that Lena Dunham has been campaigning for her: They are both products of the System announcing to you what you are going to like before you’ve quite made up your mind, and it instantly produces a backlash. These days, we value the people we feel like we found ourselves, who rose organically to the top on a stream of word-of-mouth: the YouTube stars, not the studio stars; the Vine stars, the “American Idol” winners, the Internet writers, the ones we feel like we got to choose and discover on our own. We like to feel included and directly connected. We like to meme our stars, use them as a canvas, Shepard Fairey style.

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And this is not how the Clintons roll, to put it mildly.

Hillary Clinton is not your new bicycle. She is not your blank canvas. She is, if anything, too detailed.