Manchester, N.H.

Hillary Clinton first grabbed the national spotlight 47 years ago as an idealistic young feminist, chiding the paternalistic establishment in her Wellesley commencement speech.

So it's passing strange to watch her here, getting rebuffed by young women who believe that she lacks idealism, that she overplays her feminist hand and that she is the paternalistic establishment.

She's traveling around New Hampshire with a former president who could easily layer in some poetry, and a handful of specific snappy plans for the future. But somehow, Hill and Bill campaign side by side without achieving synergy.

Hillary is like a veteran actor who doesn't audition well. Bill could tell her not to shout her way through rallies, that it doesn't convey passion but just seems forced, adding to her authenticity problem.

In the MSNBC debate on Thursday night, Hillary huffily said she could not be an exemplar of the establishment, as Bernie Sanders suggested, because she's "a woman running to be the first woman president."

But she is establishment. So is Nancy Pelosi. So was Eleanor Roosevelt. Hillary must learn to embrace that and make it work for her, not deny it. As a woman, as a former first lady, senator and secretary of state, she's uniquely equipped to deliver a big, inspiring message with a showstopping speech that goes beyond income inequality, that sweeps up broader themes of intolerance, fusing the economic, cultural and international issues at stake.

Lyndon Johnson said that the two things that make politicians more stupid than anything else are sex and envy. With Hillary, there are three things: sex, money and the need for secrecy.

She was in on sliming her husband's ex-girlfriends who told the truth about liaisons. She has long been driven by a fear of being "dead broke," as she put it — and a conviction that she deserved the life and perks she would have had if she had gone into the private sector. That led her to do her suspiciously lucrative commodity trades while Bill was Arkansas attorney general and to make Wall Street speeches on the cusp of her 2016 campaign, even though she and Bill had already made more than $139 million between 2007 and 2014.

The Nixonian obsession with secrecy by the woman who was once an idealistic lawyer on the Watergate committee staff — on Whitewater, health care and her State Department emails — caused her to unnecessarily damage herself.

While she was giving three speeches to Goldman Sachs for $675,000, her party was changing. As the economy slowly healed, Democrats were seething with anger over the big banks that never got punished for wrecking the economy and the reckless billionaires who are still living large. A tone-deaf Hillary was there sucking at the teet and that rubs people the wrong way.

The Wall Street Journal calculates that since the Clintons first entered national politics in the early '90s, Wall Street has given more than $100 million to their campaigns, foundation and personal finances.

When Anderson Cooper asked why Hillary had taken the obscene Goldman Sachs windfall, she gave a stupefyingly bad answer to a predictable question. "Well, I don't know," she said, throwing up her hands and shrugging. "That's what they offered."

As with the Chappaqua email server, Hillary is not sorry she did it. She's only sorry people are making a fuss about it.

Typical of the Clintons, she tried to drag in others to excuse her own ethically lax behavior, noting that "every secretary of state that I know has done that." After the Monica scandal broke, Clinton aides cited Thomas Jefferson, FDR and JFK to justify Bill's Oval Office cavorting.

But the other secretaries of state were not running for office, Cooper pointed out.

"To be honest I wasn't — I wasn't committed to running," Hillary said.

It's that sort of disingenuous answer that has spurred so many Democrats to turn to the straight-shooting, Wall Street-bashing Sanders.

Sanders's populist surge — he raised $20 million last month, $5 million more than Hillary — has led some top Democrats to wonder if President Barack Obama will have to step in and endorse her.

Wouldn't that be rich? The Wellesley idealist-turned-realist needs the Chicago idealist-turned-realist who beat her last time to save her from the Vermont idealist clinging to a simple reality: Wall Street fleeced America and none of the big shots got punished.

Dowd writes for The New York Times.