Whatever traits of intelligence and diligence she may have displayed as a senator or secretary of state, the issue of trustworthiness -- or its lack -- has dogged her long career.
As a memo (http://bit.ly/1PeoYqp) from the 2008 Barack Obama campaign shows, that campaign positioned itself to take advantage from her style of over-protectiveness and suspicion of the very public (in the form of the press) whose trust and vote she solicited.
My disquiet with her candidacy stemmed from appraisal of her instincts of aggressive intervention in the Middle East and urge for regime change. That and her difficulty with owning up to error made me fearful that she had learned little from her support for George Bush's Iraq war fiasco.
As the secretary of state in 2011, Hillary Clinton pressed the Obama administration to intervene militarily in Libya, with consequences that have gone far beyond the fall of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi.
In both of these instances (and others) of poor judgment, Mrs Clinton resisted taking personal responsibility. It was Bush's deception, she said of her vote. It was President Obama's decision to bomb Libya.
The party lost because it has lost the connection between itself and the core group of white working and middle-class men and women who have long been its loyal supporters. That's been the acknowledgment of Democratic Party stalwarts.
Decline in the fortunes of the workers of America began long ago in the Jimmy Carter administration with President Carter's conservative policy of deregulation, but was accelerated under Ronald Reagan with his union-busting.
The long slide continued as Bill Clinton turned the Democratic Party to the right and hired economists overly friendly to Wall Street. The downward trend continued through the Bush and Obama years.
Those voters had had enough.
Mrs Clinton, whose failures must include taking several key states for granted, did little to address the concerns of those voters. Bernie Sanders' message did resonate with that group and early polls showed him beating Trump decisively while Mrs Clinton was ahead only within the margin of error.
The leaked emails of the Democratic Party apparatus show how the party's power was arrayed and used against Sanders, helping make Hillary the candidate. Interviews with Donald Trump voters before and after election show many would have preferred Sanders.
Hillary and her party did not speak or even actively seek those critical voters. Trump, they say, at least recognised their concerns.
While Trump's successful manipulation of the media did play a significant role in his eventual election, the shortcomings of the Democratic Party and of its candidate made that election outcome much more likely. The party and its candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, deserved to lose.
Whether the party learns from this defeat and returns to its working man and working woman roots, it is the rest of us in the world that will pay the price for their hubris.
�Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
