WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Hillary Clinton needs to get over herself if she wants to win the White House.

Her unfavorability rating is sky high, she continues at best to divide the primary vote with a rival who is not even really in the party, and polls show her in a dead heat with a Republican opponent who many feel poses an existential threat to American democracy.

From the beginning, Clinton has made her campaign about her — her record of public service, her fighting in the trenches against that vast right-wing conspiracy, her needing an email server for the convenience of a single cellphone, her making a mistake about how people would perceive that, her being a better choice than Bernie Sanders because she is a progressive who gets things done.

One of her original campaign slogans — amid many subsequent efforts — was “Fighting for You.” The implied subject of that sentence is “I.”

Donald Trump’s slogan, by contrast, is “Make America Great Again.” The implied subject is “you,” and it is an empowering slogan that addresses the frustrations of many Americans and offers a solution at the same time.

The response of many voters to Trump’s empowering slogan has been, “Count me in.”

Also read: Trump’s populist economic message baffles the elites

The response to Clinton’s self-centered slogan, meanwhile, has been more on the order of, “Yeah, sure, whatever.”

Bernie Sanders’s slogan, “A future to believe in,” is also empowering because again it is “you,” the voter, doing the believing.

Political analyst Peter Roff offers a simple explanation as to why Trump has virtually overtaken Clinton in polls for the general election: “It all comes down to one thing: vision. He has it, she doesn’t and the voters know it.”

And vision, Roff goes on to say, is explaining why you want to be president. “If you can’t explain why you want to be president, don’t expect anyone else to do it for you,” Roff says.

Sanders and Clinton Neck and Neck in California

Clinton’s challenge, according to no less an authority than Mark Penn — the pollster and consultant widely blamed for her muffing her 2008 campaign — is to establish a more positive image of herself with the public.

Also read:As president, Clinton would be like Obama: Liberal, pragmatic

Penn thinks it’s a waste of time for Clinton to be attacking Donald Trump. “Why spend so much energy attacking Trump, what difference does it make, when he’s over 57% negative and she has a lot of leadership qualities that have gone unsung?” Penn told Politico. “It’s like beating a dead horse.”

Politico goes on to point out that every time Clinton is ready to “pivot” to something positive, she runs into new obstacles from the email controversy.

This is where those “unsung leadership qualities” would come in handy — not singing about them, but showing them.

Clinton not only has failed to show leadership in getting ahead of this issue, but instead has dissembled and ducked — culminating in the damaging revelation that far from fully cooperating as she pledged to do she declined to be interviewed for the investigation by the State Department’s inspector general, or to let her closest aides be interviewed.

Then in response to the report’s clear contradiction of her claims that her exclusive use of a private email server was normal and allowed under rules prevailing at the time, she simply repeated those claims as if she hadn’t read the IG’s report.

Nor did CNN’s Jake Tapper, who scored a phone-in interview with the candidate this week, follow up by asking her why she didn’t cooperate with the report.

And when asked about what she and Sanders can do to unify the Democratic Party once the primaries are over, she talked only about how hard she would campaign, how sincerely she would reach out to the Sanders campaign, and how they would work together to keep Trump out of the White House.

Once again, she passed up an opportunity to talk about what she can do for those Americans who feel left out or left behind to talk instead about how darn hard she is working to win this race.

A foreign policy speech planned for this week intends once again to showcase how much experience Clinton has and why she’s a better bet than Trump on national security.

And yet, the record of the Obama administration on those issues, which she had a large role in shaping, is hardly an open-and-shut case for competence and her recitation of that record is not likely to rebut Trump’s assertion that the U.S. is being taken for a ride by both allies and adversaries.

It may be that once she is free to “pivot” to the general election, Clinton will demonstrate a verve and a vision whose absence has made the primary such a hard slog.

Or it may be that Trump continues to stray from his core message of addressing America’s ills to indulge in his peevish battles with the press and the Republican establishment, making Clinton look presidential by contrast.

But running on a strictly anti-Trump platform and touting her long experience as a Washington infighter would expose Clinton to a vision gap that leaves her trailing Trump in November.

It was the first President Bush who famously expressed exasperation that his aides kept badgering him about “the vision thing.”

He had the good fortune to run against Michael Dukakis in 1988 and won a term as president on Ronald Reagan’s coattails. He was not so lucky in 1992 when Ross Perot drained off a lot of his support and a more formidable Democratic campaigner by the name of Bill Clinton sent him packing.

That Clinton, campaigning under the slogan “It’s time to change America,” understood that the focus of the vision thing was the American people, not the hard-fighting candidate.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton needs to articulate that kind of vision if she wants to beat Donald Trump.