Don’t get me wrong — basically, I’m a fan. And I understand that all presidents are flawed. But before the hagiography gets fully underway on January 21st, I want to remind people of some things. And I want to suggest that if we measure a president by his legacy, then the things that I’m going to detail below are particularly crucial to any assessment of Obama as a ‘great’ president. Where he has failed are precisely in categories and with policies that have left us weaker, and left the weakest even more vulnerable. So, in no particular order:

Drone policy — As Jeremy Scahill states in The Intercept’s “The Drone Papers,” “Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination.” We can’t even know how many actual terrorist targets have been taken out. In fact the range of civilian casualties vaguely sits somewhere between 493 and 1,168 in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia alone. And, as Adam Gallagher puts it in The Prospect, the policy (when one was finally set out in 2013) is basically that “all adult males killed by drone strikes are considered terrorists — unless proven otherwise, after they’ve already been killed.”

Surveillance — Obama has pursued policies that have created the most powerful and unaccountable surveillance state the world has ever seen. We may hand-wring over Putin’s electoral exploits, but it is the NSA and all of the other intelligence organizations of the US that have been exponentially strengthened over the last eight years. And responsibility sits with the president who seems so sure of his own goodness that he doesn’t see the inherent evil in policies he sets. So now, he is handing over agencies over whom oversight has been weakened to the point of laughability. As Stephen Walt argued in Foreign Policy in 2013, even before Snowden’s NSA revelations, covert surveillance means there is never the opportunity for a citizen to confront his or her accuser, making it therefore, unconstitutional, a priori.

Refusal to engage in politics — Supporters of Obama like to lay full blame for any failures to get legislation passed at the feet of the Republicans. But that’s convenient amnesia. We need to remember, for example, that the ACA was passed in December 2009. It went into effect in March of 2010, with a series of legislative changes that occurred at regular intervals — after 90 days, 180 days, 6 months, start of 2011, etc. And finally, on October 1, 2014 we arrived at the start date for the HealthCare.gov website.

Throughout that entire period, if people are honest with themselves, there was intense frustration with Obama and his administration because they refused to try and sell the program: tout its benefits, point out successes as they started to happen. For example, groups like Kaiser polled and found a majority of Americans in 2010 were actually in favor of the law and strategists implored Obama at the time to stump for the program — and he never did.

Refusal to get his hands dirty — The stuff I described above was all once the ACA was passed. Many Dems also like to forget the fact that when the law was being crafted everyone knew it was never going to be supported by Republican lawmakers and yet he kept trying to make it more appealing in hopes of a bipartisan win. In other words, Obama’s obsession with the possibility of consensus (ie. his pathological aversion to using the power of his majority when they had it) meant that the ACA was already less than it could have been when it was sent to the Republicans in the first place because he kept trying to find some ‘middle ground,’ by making concessions without anyone even asking for them!

Closing Guantanamo — Obama stated that one of the first things he would do was close the prison. He never did. Now, people will say, “it’s complicated.” Yeah. No kidding. They will also suggest that he’s been diligently trying. But that’s also a convenient rewriting of history. In the summer of his first year in office, Obama stated quite clearly that he accepted the fact that the prison couldn’t and shouldn’t be closed because it posed too much of a security risk. As Karen Greenberg sets out in a lengthy piece in The Nation in April, there has really never been a message that this was a driving imperative. Obama and Holder both backed down on multiple occasions regarding procedure, military courts, etc.

Red lines — This is symptomatic of a larger problem. For a president who has consistently been described as a “man of conviction,” Obama has repeatedly and frustratingly changed a very clearly stated position. Now, I’m the first to agree that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, but there has been a troubling tendency to find that inconsistency more often on positions of principle — like Gitmo, or chemical warfare in Syria, or intervention in Libya.

Foreign policy — I am not an interventionist when it comes to foreign policy. I firmly believe that one of the best things that Obama has done is resist the temptation to strap on the six-shooters when it’s the politically easy and expedient thing to do. The United States is going through whatever the opposite of growing pains are — as the great empire shrinks in power and influence it is very tempting to throw the patriots some red meat to ease their sense of growing inadequacy.

But two major events were massive miscalculations that Obama supporters like to minimize. The first is the invasion of Libya without any subsequent follow through. To be fair, he is totally aware of the failure there — according to an Atlantic piece by Dominic Tierney, he himself called it a “shit show.” Under cover of UN resolutions and NATO coordination, Obama and Cameron thought that a quick and easy regime change was possible. They flouted the embargo that they themselves had supported, thereby actually escalating events. And they both hid behind — and thereby weakened — two institutions that Republicans and foreign enemies like Russia already criticize.

And Syria. Well. For the most part there is no right answer and there hasn’t been since the beginning. But one very, very wrong move was the two steps forward, one step back dance of hawk to dove and back again that occurred from August to October of 2013. And of course a central part of it was the infamous drawing of the red line of intervention in the event of chemical attacks against civilians, and then reneging on that. He should never have said it. By doing so, he set up false hope within the ranks of the rebels. Beyond that, he perhaps actually insured that the attacks happened.

In all fairness, Derek Cholet, who was an Obama advisor, has written a lengthy defense in Politico of Obama’s strategy during that time. And who am I to naysay the insider. But in the essay, Cholet is solely focused on the White House’s actions as part of a strategy to get Assad to admit he possessed chemical weapons. And boy, they sure were successful. But at what price? And purely on the subject of moral equivocation that I mentioned above — it bothers me that Obama’s persona is that of the quintessential man of principle. And yet, it is precisely in that area that he has often shown his weakest self.

So what’s the legacy?

We won’t know for a while. But two contradictory behaviors over the past eight years have left the office, the nation, and the world, quite vulnerable. Obama has permitted himself to stray over moral lines repeatedly. Without claiming to peer into his soul, it seems that his abiding faith in human decency in general, and his own in particular, have been his enablers in this. And yet, on the other hand, he has insisted on the rightness of his position, and refused to compromise his principles, get down and dirty with the other politicians and engage in the proverbial sausage making.

This paradox — that he has found wiggle room when grappling with his own conscience but rigidity when engaging with anyone else’s — will leave a destructive legacy. The rightness of his drone and surveillance policies — just as two examples — are predicated on the president and the leaders of the military and intelligence apparatus being people of principle. And the imperious style and greater opacity of his administration, which has repeatedly been excused by supporters as necessary because of the recalcitrance of his opponents, now appears to have conveniently set out the tools of authoritarianism for someone less upstanding to wield.

“Ronald Reagan would roll over in his grave,” Obama declared at his last press conference. He was commenting on the poll revealing that more than one third of GOP voters had a favorable view of Vladimir Putin, despite CIA and FBI consensus that Russia directly sought to affect the outcome of the election.

Reagan, elected in 1980, was the last American leader whose entire term in office was defined by the bi-polar world order. The Cold War. East vs West. Us vs Them.

Supposedly, he would be rolling in his grave because he was the last president who took a tough stance against the existential enemy that was communist totalitarianism: “Tear down this Wall!” and all that.

The thing is, Reagan was also the president who set up where we are now. And I don’t mean in the way that liberals usually mean: the insistence on small government and the importance placed on communication over actual information — although those are big and fairly damaging legacies. What I would point to is that eight years of Reagan’s famous disinterest in the details of things occurred at the same time as the slow crumble of the Communist Bloc; and, as a result, in some subtle and not at first noticeable way, correlation became causation. Accidentally, he made it look as if the West won because it was our birthright, rather than because our institutions were more vital.

Prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the official end of the Soviet Union two years later, there was one over-arching principle that ordered the world. It perfectly suited the Manichaean tendency in the human psyche. It was a struggle between two opposing forces who asserted their complete and utter hatred for each other. They were enemies; good, old-fashioned foes.

The Cold War was a giant PR campaign. The great European imperial powers had accumulated global empires in the previous two centuries. Then, just when those empires were crumbling and billions of people were shopping around for a new political and economic system, two diametrically opposed world views were on offer.

Never mind that the rhetoric of liberal democracy was far more clear cut than the reality. It didn’t matter so much that the West often oppressed people and constantly spied on them; supported some strong men and assassinated others. All things being equal, there was consensus that sane people would still choose to live in the West over the other option.

In fact, the gap between the promise and the reality was exactly the tension necessary to keep the West in a constant state of confident progress. “We are obviously right. But we are also always working towards a ‘more perfect union’,” sums up the zeitgeist of the era.

Crucial beliefs kept the West self-critiquing and improving during the Cold War decades, despite the expense, despite the hard graft of bipartisan cooperation needed to get things done. Neither party had the luxury of following a whim, or refusing to deal with an issue simply because it was unpopular.

Brought down to its basic components, the West had to favor certain principles that it has since abandoned. Existential dread is a great motivator. When our enemy disappeared, it was hard to find a good enough reason to keep doing all the hard stuff.

But do we really want to harken back to the Cold War era as “the good old days”? Well, it’s complicated. Was it an oppressive time when civil liberties were denied in the name of national security and sovereign nations were invaded in the name of freedom? You bet. And did we live with a baseline of dread that we’d never see old age because we’d all die in a nuclear cataclysm? Sure.

Nevertheless, the United States and the rest of the West, consistently and on a large scale, put in the effort to maintain the fundamental institutions of democracy because people in positions of power understood that there would be immediate and concrete ramifications if we didn’t. And it was an accepted truth that these crucial ingredients of Western society weren’t going to run themselves, or fund themselves. At least, this was the case until Reagan’s breezy dismissal of the tenets of the Great Society gave politicians and voters permission to coast.

First and foremost, the West in general, and the United State in particular, made high quality affordable education a priority. We had to compete against the USSR, plain and simple. A lot is made now of the decline in math and science skills amongst American children. But the entire liberal arts education was cultivated and promoted during the Cold War, not just the disciplines that NASA and the Defense Department needed. Contrasted with the authoritarian model of our enemy, the value of an educated, informed and engaged electorate was touted as the West’s most important asset.

The perception that this race was neck and neck continued almost to the very end. There was no doubt that Russian children could be as educated as American ones. And because the main enemy was still Caucasian and (sort of) European, Americans accepted that they were a worthy adversary. That’s why they managed to scare the crap out of us so effectively. But once the Eastern Bloc collapsed, it wasn’t replaced by any foe seen as scientifically or intellectually threatening.

It just so happened that a global audience in the market for new civil institutions emerged when the Cold War was heating up. As former colonies gained their independence from the 1950s to 80s, the bi-polar world order dictated that everyone had to pick a side. Some countries, particularly weaker or geographically strategic ones, got caught up in extremely destructive proxy wars orchestrated by the US and the USSR. But in many places capitalism and communism were actually forced to vie for the hearts and minds of former colonies. Investment, infrastructure development, trade deals and technology were benefits of alignment explicitly connected to the political model that sponsored them.

Now, most of the West’s current enemies are contemptuous of western education, science, and cultural expression, and so our politicians and business leaders have a perfect excuse to neglect them all. The “war of civilizations” narrative skips the part about the civil institutions that constitute a civilization. And so there’s been no check on the grotesque fetishization of Reagan’s small government, reduced spending, lower taxes mantra.

Also, because the differences between the West and its enemies are now framed far more in racial and ethnic terms than during the Cold War, we can see Americans and Europeans treating the benefits of education, technology and healthy political institutions as an inalienable right tied to cultural and racial identity rather than the results of hard work and vigilance — in other words, investment.

And the principle of inclusion. Let’s face it, even during the Cold War, America’s civil rights record didn’t really give those colonial populations around the world a very warm and fuzzy feeling about the United States. And the USSR was happy to bring that fact up with potential new allies in former European colonies whenever possible. The white and powerful in America (and elsewhere) were extremely reluctant to swallow the bitter pill of politically risky and socially disruptive civil rights legislation. But considerations on the global stage motivated successive American administrations to take the cure. They could only defend against Soviet propaganda by bringing the American reality into closer alignment with the rhetoric of democracy. Closer, mind you. Not actually aligned.

If the eyes of the world weren’t watching, it’s impossible to know when the Civil Rights advances that occurred in the 1950s, 60s and 70s would have finally been achieved. What we do know is that now, when there’s no perceived global benefit to it, the rights of people of color and women, gained at great political cost during those decades, are contracting. In some cases, this is actively happening; in other cases, it’s simply due to neglect.

If we have any doubt that there’s a direct relationship between the two, ask yourself: if the Soviet Union still existed, would Trump be an acceptable spokesperson for Western values in the face of ‘communist’ authoritarianism?

The term itself — bi-polar — suggests that each pole would become even more, well…polarized. But that, in fact, is not what happened. In order to resist and reject the critique that unbridled capitalism could be heartless and inhumane, the West was driven to ameliorate its worst tendencies. The United States wasn’t inclined to take on the full trappings of the social welfare state, as Western Europe did. Nevertheless, there was an understanding between big business and government, that global markets would be more available if emerging economies were aligned with the West. And the shared wisdom was that India, Indonesia, Algeria et al, were more likely to lean that way voluntarily if America projected an image of shared prosperity. A useful level of inequality encouraged aspiration and rewarded enterprise, the message ran, but there also needed to be an equal playing field.

In other words, there was a capitalism/democracy sweet spot. But again, without the alternative, there hasn’t been sufficient motivation since 1991 to suppress capitalist excess. The Cold War ensured the availability of quality education, housing, and other drivers of middle class opportunity. Despite the occasional hysteria about commies in unions, the reality was that business and labor generally cooperated because a well-paid workforce was seen as both economically desirable and politically useful. Unbridled capitalism was bad PR.

Countries with colonial pasts could recognize a perpetually exploited underclass when they saw one. Today, however, this seems to come as a shock to neo-liberals who assumed that with a vanquished Soviet Union, capitalism won the argument in perpetuity. Reagan’s “trickle-down economics” is only returned to again and again despite its obvious and repeated failure as an economic model because the stakes just haven’t been high enough. Ironically, America’s own population has been slow to learn this lesson precisely because the tools of critical citizenship are part of what’s been stripped away as government spending shrinks and shrinks.

Finally, in the last few weeks, with the election of a President without any historical memory of his own, and with no regard for the benefit of established wisdom, we’ve seen the greatest organizing principle of the Cold War abandoned. The ingredient that most reliably focused the mind and brought clarity to many decision-making processes prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, has just now been cast aside: the existential threat of nuclear weapons.

This is another instance where Reagan’s over-simplification of a problem set the stage for Trump’s disregard of an obvious danger and others’ acquiescence to that position. It might have seemed like “duck and cover,” bomb shelters, and Godzilla movies minimized the risks of nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War. But the public had a very strong understanding of the potential for destruction that the nuclear age brought. Particularly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, East and West took the possibility of total annihilation very seriously, both in official circles and in the Nuclear Disarmament movement. But Reagan’s “Star Wars”, or Strategic Defense Initiative, was the policy that began to minimize that threat. Soon, it was promised, we’ll be able to shoot missiles out of the sky, just like in the space westerns!

And then the fear disappeared. Sure, there was the possibility of a dirty bomb in the hands of terrorists, or of India and Pakistan blowing each other up. But really, that wasn’t an existential threat. Let the North Koreans keep lobbing sad little projectiles into the Pacific, the new reasoning went. We have more nuclear weapons than we’ll ever need. Now we can use defense spending as a way to insure re-election rather than insure our ‘way of life.’

So while Trump has, as with all things, taken it to the extreme, there had already been decades of increasingly lackadaisical policy about the continued danger of nuclear destruction. And that was just one symptom of a much larger problem. The West won the Cold War. And without any truly worthy foe rising up and taking the place of the Evil Empire, victory has proven fatal.

No one should think that what I’m calling for is a nostalgic return to the good old days of the Cold War, when we held ourselves to a higher standard because we had such a worthy foe. The civil rights violations, beginnings of mass incarceration to replace Jim Crow, manipulation of democratic processes around the world in the name of democracy, and general fear and paranoia are not things to be lauded.

I’m simply pointing out that we can trace where we are now back to the moment when, as Francis Fukuyama famously claimed, we had reached “the end of history.” Of course, what he meant was that ideologically driven conflict had now ended with liberal democracy’s supposedly obvious and crushing victory. Needless to say, his self-congratulation was premature. But the other part of his observation, that we had lost the organizing structure for our historical narrative, was quite true.We’ve spent the time since then searching for a new ideological foe because it turns out that we need one — we don’t seem to be very self-motivating. Or able to know who were are without knowing who we aren’t.

So, perhaps Reagan would roll over in his grave to see the current Republican establishment yawn at the current Russian threat. But then again, if the Cold War were still in place, Reagan would simply be one in the middle of a long line of presidents, advised by well-trained technocrats, leading an educated, stable and modern nation whose purpose was still clear: to seek a more perfect union. Instead, we have undermined the very principles of democracy; and the story may end up being that, because we couldn’t find one elsewhere, we have become our own worst enemy.

It will become part of 21st Century Authoritarian Era scholarship (that’s my bet on what historians will call the whole field of study) that those who most benefited from the advances of communication technology in the aughts and the teens completely misunderstood its ineffectualness in this moment.

In a distant future, historians will chart how the real resistance to fascism and other forms of authoritarianism around the world in these decades began when foot soldiers of those resistance movements returned to first principles: their bodies, their comfort, their livelihoods, had to be risked in order to win.

In this moment, no kind of email, or FB inspired postcard campaign, or petition, or phone call list will make any difference whatsoever. We have moved past the point where any kind of virtual pressure from constituents is useful. The whole point is that those who will be leading Trump’s new America simultaneously glorify American political institutions while completely disregarding their expressed function. There is no appeal to a sense of duty. Reality itself is up for debate. And that debate cannot take place in virtual space.

Historians will recognize and study at length which historical actors were most able to adapt to the new political violence. It will be noted that the brutality that began to proliferate under Trump was paralyzingly shocking to those for whom physical and even verbal violence had long been avoided. Enclosed in a physical and intellectual circle of like-mindedness, the impact of actual conflict was only a distant reality for many people. For them, the return of violence was initially disabling. But for others, it wasn’t a big deal. Those who had never escaped its immediacy and those who shifted back into concrete engagement the fastest, were the ones who emerged most resilient and most useful.

Researchers will unearth evidence that there were far more people for whom social media provided little or no improvement to their lives before the Trumpian Reaction than was believed at the time. Many people didn’t really use it much, or at least not in the ways imagined. They lived in local relationships and used the internet, if at all, to augment their sense of the world, not build it. They texted their friends, but just to arrange to meet at the bar or to organize a bake sale; they used Facebook primarily to let friends and family see pictures of the kids; they shopped online but still thumbed through the catalog they got in the mail before making a decision.

It will become apparent that many of these people were quickest to embrace the satisfying physicality of the new post-democratic era. Verbal intimidation was a good start. It was a very short journey from there to physical confrontation with strangers because it wasn’t alien for these late-or-minimal adopters to actually engage with real, live, present human beings. And they were already used to interactions that weren’t prescribed, curated, or controlled.

On a global scale, authoritarian actors had already made this point. The cosmopolitan West just hadn’t really been paying attention. Everyone celebrated how the new social media had leveled the playing field. Look at Tahrir Square! they said. But when it started to become very apparent that Facebook was no match for good, old-fashioned physical pain, people stopped clicking on that link.

Early defeats elsewhere made many in the West turn away, full of judgement, but also full of a nagging dread. Like the woman on a jury who unconsciously blames the rape victim because she has to imagine her story would be different or she’ll be paralyzed with fear.

Luckily, future historians will say, many useful people didn’t embrace the new autocratic regime and they didn’t turn away. They understood that technology could be used to organize protest and resistance, but it couldn’t replace people actually inconveniencing themselves, risking discomfort and disruption, pain and death. The “flat earth” promise was always ridiculous to them (if they had even ever heard of it) — whether they were in Ankara, Juarez, or Delhi.

And so leadership of the resistance emerged from among those for whom violence already permeated their world — people like anti-Putin activists in Russia, First Nations leaders in Canada and the US, Black Lives Matter organizers, gay rights advocates in east Africa, and others. They had already lived the consequences of demanding the right to speak and act.

Or they had a revelatory experience that undermined their sense that the world was becoming more transparent, fair and reasonable. Women, in particular, who had asserted themselves and become the target of subreddit trolls, or put their faith in a college conduct board, or realized after the test came back positive that the last clinic for 500 miles had already been closed, became braver once they realized that the violence that was already all around them wasn’t going away.

As with every moment in history that played out like the 21st Century Authoritarian Era, it took a while for early resistance leaders to get others to recognize just how serious the situation was. They only gathered substantial followers after 2024, when the Trumpian Reaction had given way to something much worse. The censorship, restricted movement, and voter suppression laws finally convinced enough educated, affluent, urban citizens that they had already lost all the things they hadn’t wanted to risk in the fight. And then they began to get real.

In an article this week  about how history can help us understand our new reality, historian Jane Caplan opens by echoing the common query: “Is Trump a fascist?” And then goes on to ask: Why do we want to know?

The article is incredibly useful as a distillation of what people need to be thinking about in this moment. But because Caplan is using it as a rhetorical tool, she doesn’t ever actually answer that second question. And I think it’s a very important one. So that’s my starting point here. Why do we ask if Trump is a fascist? What does that answer get us that simply identifying him as a bad man doesn’t?

My suspicion is that the reason why people keep asking that question is because it’s short-hand for: “Are we going to have to stop him?” If Trump were simply incompetent, or someone whom liberals thought held bad policy positions, then they could continue to rail against him, share posts that ridiculed him, complain about him at parties, and wait out the four years until, hopefully, they could vote him out of office with the help of Republicans who by then were suffering from buyers’ remorse.

But if the answer to that question, Is Trump a fascist? is Yes… well, then that sets in motion an entirely different set of imperatives. Then we actually have to do something. If Trump is a fascist, and his advisors, appointees, and financial supporters are fascists, then he and they are an existential threat to an entire moral structure.  If that is now at risk, then the political, social and economic systems that are built around that central moral premise are also under threat. For the purposes of this article, we won’t examine whether any or all of those are fundamentally flawed and brought rise to Trump in the first place.

What we know is that it is very difficult for people to absorb substantial changes to their routines. Endless studies have been done that show people have a really hard time switching into emergency mode. Whether it’s during fires, terrorist attacks, or simply in response to an unexpected encounter, we are hard-wired to fall back on the habitual.

So, in this moment, when the absolutely extraordinary is happening, every previous instance of winners and losers in an election cycle is pushing us to adopt certain kind of behavior. Typically, in the No Man’s Land of the transition, those on the losing side vow to redouble their efforts to protect and push forward their agenda. And those on the winning side promise that the new government is there to serve all citizens. There is a choreography that both sides follow that is determined by the framework of Constitutional law, the bylaws and protocols of Congress, the Executive branch, and the military/security community.

There are powerful, centripetal forces at work – both psychological and institutional. So to ask the question: Is Trump a fascist? is an oblique way to ask if we are going to have to resist all of that, wrench ourselves out of the vice-like hold of normality, and fight. We haven’t yet wanted to ask it plainly and directly, as if just by articulating it as a possibility we might accidentally make it so. And because we’re so used to the answer to that question being No, we are hoping against hope that it is again.

Sorry.

Is Trump a fascist? Yes.

Are you going to have to fight? Yes.

Did Clinton’s smile seem stiff/did she smile too much?

Neither of these is actually the question of the day, it seems. The question of the day is – “Why aren’t we allowed to ask these questions?” That’s the question that David Frum and others want answered.

I know, people. It’s tough.

There’s this thing. You can see it. The smile that’s a bit much. The outfit that’s so unflattering.

You’re invested. You want Hillary to do well, either because you sincerely think she’d make a good president or because you’re scared to death of the alternative. So you wish that she didn’t have this flaw, this weakness. You want everyone who’s still undecided to have a clear path to liking her. You don’t want her to put up any roadblocks between herself and even one more potential supporter.

So you mention it. Just as a useful note, some helpful coaching. And all of a sudden, all sorts of people are telling you that it’s off limits. You’re being unfair. You’re not allowed to criticize Hillary for this because it isn’t something men get criticized for.

But this is so confusing. You swear you can remember male politicians having their smiles made fun of. Let’s face it, everyone is having a blast making fun of what Donald looks like. And you actually support Hillary! It isn’t a sexist observation you’re making. You’re rooting for her!

You just want her to be the best version of herself that she can be in order to please the most people.

But there is something that you don’t understand. And it’s the thing that all of those people saying ‘Hey! Off limits!’ understand.

This is it. There is no version of her that hasn’t already been scrutinized and critiqued. For her whole life. She is very well aware of everything she does or says. Every laugh, frown, vocal tone, gesture, outfit, hairstyle, has been self-policed and policed by others. This is what becoming a woman is – calibrating who we are and what we want with what is expected of us. And there is probably no other woman on the face of the earth who has gone through a version of this universal female experience to the degree that Hillary has.

So to insinuate, at this late date, that she is somehow unaware of her flaws, her shortcomings, or worse, that she – we – just don’t care or just don’t want to hear it, seems a bit ungenerous, quite frankly. Accusing Hillary of a lack of dedication or a disregard for the stakes, even now, doesn’t seem quite fair.

There is no note, no pointer, no helpful hint, no supportive criticism, no little suggestion that will be constructive. They’ve all already been made.

And I’m sure she appreciated the input. Just like we all have.

So what you see is what you get. Because to be honest, there are no more adjustments that can be made before the original just snaps, breaks, tears. This is the point at which you just have to decide whether she, we, are pleasing enough, are satisfactory. Because she – and the rest of us saying ‘Don’t go there!’ – understand that if it hasn’t been altered to please you by now, it can’t be altered. Or this alteration came at the price of another one. You can’t have it all.

And if one more supporter can’t be lured into Hillary’s camp because she failed to make that last little correction…? Well, she’ll probably be sorry to have disappointed you.