Until a week or so ago this presidential election looked like it was Hillary Clinton’s to lose. So much so that Hillary was told to prepare for a landslide win. But despite her demographic and electoral advantages and having massively outspending Donald Trump on everything  Hillary’s daunting lead has crumbled and now Trump appears to have the momentum.

It seems like Hillary, after spending the entire time since she became the presumptive nominee throwing all the mud she could find at the Donald, now knows what those of us who wanted someone other than Trump learned, it just doesn’t matter and The Donald just doesn’t care.

Which brings us back to the question at hand: What’s the problem with Hillary? Why does she get caught in scandal after scandal, lie after lie to the point where voters don’t think she is honest or trustworthy and Hillary’s image is now the worse it has ever been?

In part it’s the silly and dumb things she says like “What, like with a cloth or something?” It’s also the poll-tested artificiality of every campaign move she makes, But there is more, much more.

Hillary might be a great policy wonk, but she is a terrible candidate. The more people find out about Hillary the less they like her. After all Hillary has been reintroduced time and time again. Consider all the kick offs and resets to her 2016 presidential campaign.

Todd Purdum, tells us that Hillary wasn’t always the secretive, non-transparent candidate who would collapse when forced to leave the 9/11 Commemoration ceremony early due to a “medical episode” and then emerge from seclusion a couple of hours later announcing, “I’m feeling great,” as if nothing had happened, as if she hadn’t known for two days that she had pneumonia:

No, Hillary Rodham Clinton was once willing to share her deepest thoughts and feelings, as she did in a 1993 speech on “the politics of meaning,” delivered as her father lay dying, in which she said the country was suffering “a sleeping sickness of the soul,” and urged her fellow citizens “to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the 20^th century.”

So, little by little, she gave in. And shut down. And clammed up. Even, perhaps, covered up a bit. She drafted her proposed overhaul of the nation’s health insurance system in almost complete secrecy, and paid a terrible political price. She stonewalled on inquiries into her and her husband’s business dealings, eventually all but assuring the appointment of the special prosecutor whose sprawling inquiry ultimately led to impeachment.

As Purdum notes, the problem with Hillary didn’t happen overnight. It was the result of decades of scandal and appearance impropriety that constantly swarm around Hillary Clinton. Here is a list of some of the Hillary scandals that come to mind quickly:

• Watergate – Hillary was fired from the staff of the House Judiciary committee investigating the Nixon Watergate scandal in 1974 by her supervisor, Democrat Jerry Zeifman, because she was a liar. Hillary “conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”
• Hillary’s ‘missing’ law firm billing records during the Watergate scandal.  When the records mysteriously turned up in the White House in 1996, they showed Hillary met repeatedly with key figures in the scandal.”
• Whitewater.
• Travelgate – Hillary allegedly fired seven employees and gave the positions to her Arkansas friends in a scheme to award a White House airline contract to a Clinton friend.
• Filegate – The Clintons illegally obtained FBI files on political adversaries.
• Selling access to the Lincoln Bedroom — a fundraising scandal, which NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski described as the most expensive bed and breakfast in North America. Some of the 958 visitors who slept at the White House during Clinton’s first term. Steve Jobs paid $150,000, and Steven Spielberg paid $200,000.
• Cattle Futures Scandal.
• The Clintons’ speaking fees.
• Benghazi
• Emailgate
• Selling Access to the Secretary of State — the Clinton Foundation’s pay for scandal.
• Faintgate

Unfortuntely, that is far from an exhaustive list.

At the end of his article, Purdum offers little hope for Hillary ever becoming more transparent and forthcoming:

 If Clinton loses the race to Trump, she’ll really learn what a “no-win deal” is, and she’d doubtless spend the rest of her days blaming a cynical media and partisan enemies, rather than her own personal judgment. If she wins, on the other hand, the victory will vindicate, in her mind, the stonewalling approach she’s taken for years. And the rest of us will no doubt bear witness to one of the least transparent administrations in American history.

Last Thursday Peggy Noonan tried to explain why people don’t like Hillary. Noonan focused on Travelgate, explaining how Hillary went from lie to lie trying to cover up what she had done. At the end of the article Noonan sums up what we now sadly know as the Clinton Scandal Ritual:

Lie, deny, revise, claim not to remember specifics, stall for time. When it passes, call the story “old news” full of questions that have already been answered. “As I’ve repeatedly said . . .”

As Noonan put it, people watched and got a poor impression.

Hillary and president Bill Clinton do not seem to have an ethical bone in their bodies and Hillary seems to be completely incapable of telling the truth. It’s her poor judgment, her inability to recognize an appearance of impropriety. Or worse simply not caring about the ethics expected of today’s public servants.

That’s it. Hillary is the problem with Hillary.