I honestly wonder if anyone in the Democratic Party tried, right at the start, to talk Clinton out of running. "Don't do this, Sec'y Clinton. If you run, half the country is never, EVER going to vote for you and the press will spend the entire time reporting on 'troubling' revelations about you. And we NEED to win this. Please don't burden us with your baggage."
Probably such a conversation never happened. There was no one who could have told Clinton, "Don't," and kept their job.
Hillary Clinton Afficher plus
The quality that was supposed to make up for all of Clinton's demerits was that she was a whizbang, hard-scrabble politician—and I'd really like to know what she did to gain this reputation. There's something faintly pathetic about a supposedly hardened campaigner blaming everyone around for not clapping loudly enough.