Just think about what Hillary Clinton was up against.

1. We have never had a female president or Vice President. The closest we had ever come was a terribly failed female Vice Presidential candidate.

2. She was running for a third term for the same party. This is almost never successful

3. She had almost no economic coat tails. The economy was at best mediocre.

4. She was an establishment figure running at a time of unprecedented anger among the electorate at the establishment.

5. She was treated worse by the press than any presidential candidate in my lifetime. The hostility was apparent and major news outlets would publish accusatory material they would never even think of publishing against another candidate (see number 1).

6. She had a major foreign power run what looks like now an extensive disinformation campaign against her.

7. She had a press who served as major Russian dupes in the above disinformation campaign (this is something the press has not begun to deal with. It can’’t go down the memory hole this time. It was one of the great institutional failures in American history and history will not be kind.)

8. She had an opponent who was willing to lie without regret to get what he wants. We have never had that type of candidate before.

9. She had an opposing campaign that was willing to engage in treasonous activity to win (what is a worse crime, murder?: )

10. She had the national police force (the FBI) openly hostile to her and willing to engage in unethical behaviors to bring her down.

In spite of all this Hillary Clinton did not just win the popular vote but won it by a relatively wide margin (even with the unprecedented last minute intervention of James Comey, may be burn in hell. I also believe she won the electoral college but that it was stolen, but that is an argument for another time.

Any other candidate would have been destroyed under these circumstances. Many people have much to answer for when considering 2016, Hillary Clinton is not one of them.