Hillary has already lost one presidential campaign.

This fact was stuffed down the memory hole so fast that it took a large number of political commentators along with it. How else do we explain how, in all the discussions of the upcoming elections, it has simply failed to come up? Nobody talks about it. It’s as if it didn’t happen.

It’s a rule in American politics that a major figure who blows one presidential campaign has little hope for a second act. But like all other rules, this one goes by the board when the name “Clinton” is involved.

This is particularly true in light of the way she lost. She didn’t simply lose the nomination, or the general election. She lost in one of the most ignominious ways possible: a pure dark horse appeared out of left field (metaphors have a life of their own, don’t they?) blew straight past her, and relegated her to an unimpressive second by the time the convention rolled around. For any other politician, that would be the end of the road. For Hillary, it’s one more thing to paper over and ignore.

Looked at from this viewpoint, Hillary pretty clearly fails as a viable candidate -- which is one reason why the fact has been buried by our honest media. If we were to make a closer examination, we might learn a little too much about Hillary and her actual chances. Close study of 2008 would pay great dividends, which is why the Dems and the media today are oohing and ahhing at Photoshopped pictures of Chelsea instead. (The Republicans, for their part, think it’s be unseemly to discuss a lady’s shortcomings.)

To exploit a weakness, you need to know what it is. Why did Hillary lose?

1. An attractive alternative candidate. Stop laughing out there. At the time, Obama was a fresh and promising politician. He was everything that Hillary was not. A clean and articulate African-American, according to no less an authority than Joe Biden. One with no paper trail, no skeletons in his closet, no shadowy or shifty associates. Well spoken, sincere, and truly interested in the country’s future prospects.

Well, we know how that worked out. But still -- it was enough to beat Hillary. This long shot from out of nowhere, unable to give a good account of himself, and with oddities in his record that will be debated as long as the fate of Kasper Hauser, was able to knock off the liberals’ favorite daughter while scarcely working up a sweat. If you were ask him now, he wouldn’t be able to tell you how he did it.

2. Bill. Any illusions about Bill Clinton’s stature as a political colossus were exploded in 2008. Bill spent the campaign Foghorn Leghorning his way across the political landscape hogging the spotlight, making a complete hash out his assigned role as supportive househusband, and wrapping it all up with an attempt to play the race card so blatant and shameless that it would have put any other political figure in exile. This election we can be certain that Hillary will have Bill put someplace where he can do no harm -- chained to a giant rock in the middle of the Gobi, would be my advice.

3. A Clumsy Campaign. Exactly as she’s doing today, Hillary stumbled into 2008 under the impression that the presidency was hers for the taking. She had never run for office before, in any meaningful sense (her Senate seat was in a safe New York Democratic district, the 3rd millennial equivalent of a rotten borough, seized from a befuddled Daniel P. Moynihan on his retirement), and it showed. She had no strategy, no ground plan, not even a real organization apart from the guttersnipes and hustlers that had infested Bill’s White House. When Obama began walking across the water nationwide, she had no response. Then it was too late for anything but Bill’s Orval Faubus imitation.

While all true, these aren’t enough. They lack heft. They just don’t feel right -- they’re frankly secondary. Even added together, they don’t truly explain why Hillary crashed and burned so thoroughly. Something else lies behind them.

What is that something? Simply put: the fact that almost nobody can stand Hillary. Not her most avid supporters, not her allies, not the left, not the Democrats. Hillary Clinton is the most dislikeable presidential candidate in living memory. Compared to her, Thomas Dewey was scintillating, Adlai Stevenson a pillar of charm, Richard Nixon the guy everybody wanted to be. Hillary is everyone’s despised female boss, loathed mother-in-law, troublesome subordinate, noxious bureaucrat. There is nothing likable about her. She is cold, forbidding, nasty-tempered, untrustworthy, and vindictive. All this is no way tempered by the feminine virtues. She is strictly unsensual, with not a trace of allurement about her. She is nobody’s mother, nobody’s ideal girlfriend, and nobody’s pal.

“Hillary” the public figure, the politician people are asked to vote for, is a synthesized creation that does not exist and has never existed. This is true well above and beyond the standard manipulation carried out to benefit any political career. “Hillary” is a pure fabrication, a combination of feminist delusion, left-wing wish fulfillment, and media polishing that is totally at variance with the reality.

All attempts to remake her in a more human image -- the pink suits, the soft dos, the “grannie” thing -- have failed. Hillary has gone through more image transformations than David Bowie, with the difference that Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke were more realistic.

It worked for a while. For a brief period in the mid-90s, Hillary was what Obama became in his first term: a messianic figure who was going turn the entire world around, fulfil every good liberal’s daydreams, and put a unicorn in every garage, right next to the Prius. Examples of this are myriad, but one of the most embarrassing occurred during the 1993 Academy Awards ceremony. (Poor Liza -- see about the 4:20 mark.)

But even with the entire media behind her, it couldn’t last. More lies were printed about Hillary than about any other living individual -- perhaps any human being ever. As time passed, they became more threadbare, more transparent, more palpably false. By 2008, “Hillary” was a scarecrow figure, that strange thing capering and flapping on the political horizon that spooked anybody who caught sight of it. Not something you’d want for alderman, much less president. Then Obama showed up.

Nor have the past six years changed anything. With Obama’s habit of governing from the ninth hole, her stint as Secretary of State acted as kind of a dry run for the presidency. Nobody was overseeing her, and she did what she wanted, which included getting subordinates killed and throwing the entire Middle East into chaos. Thousands have already died and perhaps millions more will die because an unqualified, incompetent woman was put into an office well beyond her capabilities. This is the major difference from 2008, and it is not an advantage.

The Democrats know this, along with the media and the left. They know what happened in 2008, and they know it’s about to happen again. Hillary’s support is as soft as a bed of quicksand. Anything can send her toppling, and all the twelve and fifteen-year-old photos appearing on the net and in print can’t change that one iota.

It was readily apparent in the “rollout”, if that’s the term I’m groping for. Sneaking into a Chipotle hidden behind sunglasses, mixing at a coffeeshop with “everyday Americans” who just happened to be Democratic operatives, tooling down the highway in a van that looks like a weapons system designed for the Terminator…. Hillary’s current status calls to mind the deterioration of Elvis, who spent his last years in almost pure isolation, living in a dream-world attended by flunkies and cronies.  

Hillary’s demolition needs to occur now. We cannot wait for events, or trust the New York Times to handle it, as some Republican figures are advising. Clarice Feldman’s careful analysis clearly demonstrates that the Hillary effort is on the brink of disintegration. It needs to be battered until it is atomized.

Trey Gowdy seems to have gotten religion. A couple weeks back, he offered Hillary a private tête-à-tête to discuss her sleazy nuclear deals with the Russians, Benghazi, and a few other small matters. Now it’s evidently full hearings with banks of 10K watt spotlights focused on her and guys in black tights and hoods standing at either end of the table.

That’s fine, but it’s not enough. We need a full court press. GOP Senate staff have the right idea with their announcement that a full report on Hillary’s scandals may not come out until the middle of the campaign. That’s pressure, and that’s good. Ted Cruz is an attack dog and can be relied upon to keep attacking. Other candidates should follow his lead. Peter Schweizer’s new book, with backing from the NYT and the major media, will be a crucial element in this program. Everybody should circle May 5^th, the publication date, and get their phaser banks fully charged.

The entire effort must be governed by the axiom: Hillary can be beaten. She is vulnerable. The 2008 campaign proves that. She failed then, she must be made to fail again.

American politics has been in kind of an interregnum since the 90s. No matter what has happened, no matter what else changed, in the back of everyone’s mind loomed the thought this Messalina was inevitable, that at one point or another, we’d have endure a Hillary presidency. Now we see a way past that. But we must make hopes become certainties. This woman must be removed from the board once and for all. The country cannot begin to heal until that occurs. Let’s get it done.