Hillary Clinton is finally winning. It looks like she will handily take the Democratic nomination for president. Her opponent will be Donald Trump, unless the Republican Party is able to advance an “anyone but Trump” candidate.

For women like me, it’s a relief to see a credible, intelligent, highly prepared female candidate running for the most powerful political office in the world. But it’s been a tremendously tough slog to get here, even among women like myself, who have hesitated to support her.

As the story goes, “she’s off-putting,” or “too full of herself.” Hillary suffers from the, “Who Do You Think You Are?” syndrome, the title of one of Canadian Nobel Prize fiction writer Alice Munro’s collections.

“Men don’t like her,” is another common attack. When she lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama in 2008, many of us were as dumbfounded as she was. The establishment forces in the Democratic Party, including Ted Kennedy, and big money deserted her. Obama was a fresh face, young, charismatic and with a soupy, but saleable message of hope and change.

Remember that? Hope and change. It didn’t quite turn out that way. In fact, there’s been little change in Washington and less hope. Obama is now desperately trying to shore up his legacy with a trip to Havana, and trying to rescue Obamacare from the GOP’s wrath. Sad to say, there’s not much else to show for eight years in office, except the disastrous Arab spring, which has turned sour in every Arabic country except Tunisia.

And still, Hillary is experiencing a rough ride in her run for the Democratic nomination. During the debates, she’s asked tougher, more comprising questions than her opponent.

It’s not just Bernie Sanders and his uplifting message. Or the reality of America, where working middle-class whites, both men and women, feel betrayed by their leadership, and are turning to more extreme solutions. It’s about Hillary, herself, and what she brings to the television screen as a 68-year-old woman, only one year younger than her husband Bill and Donald Trump.

Hillary has always been a good girl. She looks like one, she dresses like one, and she talks like one. Most of us are, no matter how far we’ve strayed from the norm upon which ambitious girls born in the forties and fifties were reared. Our generation understands the inevitable dilemma of good girlism. Like Hillary, we were the eager student sitting at the front of the class: the first one to stick up her hand when the teacher asked for volunteers.

Let’s face it, good-girlism was the only way to avoid the life of the disengaged housewife. Hillary did her homework, scored straight A’s in high school and university. Hillary even became a lawyer when most women my age believed that social work or teaching was the only way to pursue a career.

As a teacher or a social worker, you could count on a decent salary helping others who needed it most. Both professions sit high on the wage parity scale. Teaching allowed us to pick up our kids up from school and spend summer holidays with them. Most of us knew female teachers, who we admired.

But Hillary was more daring. For one thing, she married Bill Clinton and helped him to become President of the United States. Her influential role in the White House during his two terms is indisputable. Long before, she’d joined the Children’s Defense Fund, where she fought for the underprivileged and the abused. She championed Medicare as First Lady and probably had as much to do with Obamacare as the President himself.

When she lost to Obama, she did the good girl thing and came out swinging against Mitt Romney. She was the most loyal of Secretaries of State. Husband Bill even gave the speech at the 2012 Democratic Convention that assured Obama his place as a two-term president.

And still, Hillary is not someone who most of us can support without reservation. The image of the loyal wife standing by her man during the Monica Lewinsky scandal (and others), does not sit well with women of my generation.

Others find it hard to love a good girl. Certainly not a 68-year-old one, who is aiming at the presidency at the age when women are supposed to become invisible.

Even now when Hillary is hotly debating Bernie Sanders during the Democratic debates, it seems to rankle the audience and pundits alike that she knows so much – maybe too much – that she cites statistics and spouts complex policy with such aplomb. Hillary is everyone’s sour memory of the brightest girl in high school: not the cheerleader, who’s adored, but the valedictorian.

Bernie, on the other hand, is just Bernie. Authentic. Loveable. Rumpled. The real deal. The guy with a social conscience that you dated as a freshman, the one who convinced you join the Peace Corps, if you were in the U.S. or CUSO in Canada. Many of us have known a Bernie. I must admit to dating more than a few.

Hillary didn’t take the route of dating a Bernie and leaving it at that. She’s worked for everything she’s got. Now that she’s a bone fide member of the American establishment, and probably can’t believe that she’s made it all the way, she’s being faulted for being the consummate insider. She must believe that no matter what she does, she can’t win.

No wonder Hillary is cautious and paranoid. The private web server while as Secretary of State, the flubbed answers to tough questions, even losing the recent Michigan primary where she faulted Sanders for not supporting global trade deals, have caused her pain that could have been avoided. Doesn’t everyone, Miss Hillary included, realize that people in Michigan, one of the hardest hit states in the rust belt, are tired of being told that free trade is in their interest.

At times, Hillary the good girl appears to be oblivious to how desperately the working middle class has been demoralized by globalization. Much like Alicia Florrick – the attractive, intelligent spouse on television’s final season of The Good Wife – no matter how hard she tries to be naughty, there’s always someone more compromised and more desperate than she is, be it her cheating husband Governor Florrick or the other bad guys, who spoil Alicia’s career and personal life.

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Within months, Hillary will be embroiled in the fight of her life, and not against decent men like Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, but against Donald Trump. Undoubtedly the gloves will come off. Trump will make fun of her for being who she is, a woman of intelligence, competence and implacable determination. Being the schoolyard bully that Trump is, he will aim at her vulnerabilities as he attempts to turn white working America against her.

For once, I hope Hillary drops her good girl stance. She’s shown us belligerent, even cranky, but now she needs to get bad and fight for all she’s worth. America deserves her.

Joyce Wayne writes the blog RetirementMatters.ca. She is the former head of the journalism program at Sheridan Colleges and the author of The Cook’s Temptation: a novel.

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