Can she win?
That is the question that everyone in America is today asking.
Can Hillary Rodham Clinton smash through the hardest, highest glass ceiling to become the first female president of the United States of America?
Not for the first time, she is going to try and, without question, she is the frontrunner.
Nobody else has her experience. Nobody else has her fundraising ability. Nobody else has the name recognition.
And that’s perhaps the problem.
Mrs Clinton has been on the national – and now the international – stage for more than 30 years.
It is going to be extremely difficult to tell her story in a fresh and interesting way.
Also, like it or not, Mrs Clinton is a polarising figure.
A huge number of Americans want her to win. They will be rooting for her, as they say here. More importantly, they want to vote for her.
Yet a huge number of Americans will be working just as hard against her.
Why? Well, as a reporter, I’ve been lucky enough to meet both Clintons (in Bill’s case, more than once.)
None of the meetings were very long but one thing is immediately apparent.
Bill Clinton could charm the leg off an iron table. Whatever that thing is that makes you instantly like a person, he has it.
Hillary does not.
I’m not the only person who thinks so. On the contrary, Hillary’s own party – the Democrats – decided recently as 2008 that she was not for them.
They went with Obama, instead. Why? Because Obama’s story was fresher. His narrative was compelling. His campaign was less error-prone. His speeches were mesmerizing.
Obama came across as relaxed. Mrs Clinton often looked stressed.
Obama, like Bill, has an easy charm, with people from all walks of life. In Hillary, it always seems forced.
Also, like it or not, there is a smell about the Clinton years. It’s the Monica thing, but it’s not only the Monica thing.
It’s bits and pieces of scandal and gossip that built up over the years that they were last in the White House, and since.
Much of it is Bill’s fault but Hillary has a knack for controversy, too.
The first few months of 2015 should have been low-key ones for Mrs Clinton. She became a grandmother for the first time, which is a lovely news story.
But no: she found a way to stir up her adversaries.
Over the past two months, Mrs Clinton has been forced to defend her decision not to use an official government email account while she was Secretary of State.
Maybe that sounds like no big deal, but it is a big deal. The US takes very seriously the idea that everything and anything that their government does on their behalf is open to scrutiny, and should be kept for prosperity.
They even store the doodles that presidents do on their notepads while talking on the phone.
The fact that Mrs Clinton didn’t use an official email account, and deleted many of her so-called ‘private emails’ before handing her personal account over looks bad, and it smells bad, and it has dismayed her staff, who wouldn’t have thought that there could be any more controversy associated with this candidate.
In an interview with the Weekly last July, Hillary said that it was time for the US to elect a female president.
She’s right.
Pretty much every other developed country, and a few more besides, has already done it. The US looks lame and backward by comparison.
But is Hillary the right woman? Time will tell, and it is not on her side.
