Obviously, Clinton carries with her more than 25 years in the white-hot public spotlight that Sanders doesn't -- despite his career in the Senate -- and over that length of time people have been able to form opinions of her and they're ones not likely to change at this point. What you know about Hillary is what you know about Hillary. There aren't a lot of surprises. Maybe you figure this is bad for her, but in truth it can be argued that this is a positive rather than a negative because there's nothing the Republicans can throw at her that we haven't already been fed to death. And when you take a step back and look at Clinton objectively -- which is admittedly difficult for many, even, or maybe particularly, on the left -- that's exactly the point. Hillary Clinton's reputation is largely the result of a quarter century of visceral GOP hatred.

With the exception of maybe Barack Obama, whom they've irrationally loathed with the fire of a thousands suns, it's tough to name anyone conservatives have more vigorously derided throughout the years than Hillary Clinton. Even her husband, as much as they tried to take him down at every turn, earned a begrudging respect from many in the Republican party. Beating him up for, say, his sexual proclivities was the height of Beltway hypocrisy and they knew it, but politics demanded they grab onto any potential scandal they could with both hands and ride it as far as it would take them. While it's true many were bitterly jealous of Clinton's seemingly depthless charisma and sorcerer's way with voters, for the GOP leadership at the time it wasn't personal -- just really dirty business. Hillary on the other hand has always been cast as an arrogant bitch, a soulless bête noire, an irredeemably corrupt and fundamentally dishonest political hustler. From the very beginning of her time in the national political limelight, she was vilified for refusing to simply sit back and be an ornament on the White House Christmas tree, as she was apparently supposed to. And when she ventured out into her own separate political career, what was considered calculating but somehow forgivable from her husband became merely calculating -- and nefariously so -- from her. Bill was allowed to be Slick Willy. Hillary was just a rotten to the core.

The Clintons' political enemies were never shy about manufacturing every kind of conspiratorial scandal under the sun to attempt to hang around the couple's necks. As The Atlantic wrote just a few days ago, no other political figures in American history have spawned "the creation of a permanent multimillion-dollar cottage industry devoted to attacking them." (And this is noteworthy in and of itself when we consider the viciousness with which the right despises any Clinton.) But Hillary always got the worst of it, because, again, she lacked the boyish, "aw-shucks" charm of her husband and because she was seen as the nakedly ambitious one in the Clintons' rocket ride to political stardom, someone who engineered her own political climb through her merely practical marriage to Bill. Whereas we normally think of presidential political scandals as involving the person in office and no one else, Clinton-haters made sure that Hillary was not only lumped in with the president but that she was part of whatever "scheme" they had seized upon and inflated -- so Whitewater and Bill's wandering eye during those early years weren't simply a crisis of character within Bill himself but were also Hillary's problem. They made sure to highlight her involvement in the land deal the GOP attempted to turn into a high crime within the White House and it was her fault her husband was a serial philanderer, as she either caused her husband's infidelity or was corrupt enough to stick by her man amidst the allegations (always cynically and only for the sake of her own political gain).

The list goes on and on: Vince Foster was Hillary Clinton's personal friend, so of course the truth about his suicide in 1993 has given way to myth and conspiracy theory from those who believe Hillary was somehow involved in the death. The more unscrupulous on the right have always peddled that nonsense as proof Hillary has a "body count" attached to her (of which Foster was only one). There was the haranguing over Hillary's "missing law firm records," which was a lot of nothing piled on top of even more nothing. There was "Travelgate," in which routine staff changes in the White House were transformed into accusations of cronyism and in which Hillary was lambasted by Republicans for allegedly using the FBI and IRS to harass the former head of the White House travel office. (Comparable to the modern right's obsession with a phony story about "Obama's IRS" auditing conservative groups.) There was "Filegate," which saw Republicans pillory the Clintons, Hillary in particular, over a minor bureaucratic mix-up in which a Hillary hire at the Office of White House Counsel accessed files he didn't have the authority to. And of course, at the tail end of their time in the White House, Hillary was accused of helping to "loot" the White House on her way out, supposedly shipping materials to the Clintons' new home in Upstate New York.

All of this was investigated and all of it was found to be crap. But Hillary Clinton's ongoing political career only gave her GOP adversaries more alleged controversies to gin-up. She engaged in dirty dealings and then covered them up. She sold secrets to China. Her long-time adviser Huma Abedin was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and her parents had ties to al-Qaeda. She was involved in the Watergate scandal, for Christ's sake, and had ties to right-wing boogeyman Saul Alinsky. And of course, she personally got four Americans killed in Benghazi and endangered the safety and security of the United States by way of her personal server and e-mail account. She's a lying liar and a cheating cheat. She's a political Cthulu who drives men to madness by sheer force of her inhuman will and absolute malevolence. This is the caricature version of Hillary Clinton the right has carefully cultivated and hammered into the national consciousness for decades now. And if you're a liberal who believes these things about Clinton -- if you see her as anything other than a liberal Democrat who's guilty of nothing more than being a politician with faults and with a plethora of enemies like every other on this planet, including Bernie Sanders -- you've proven that the protracted smear campaign against this woman has worked. You prove that the GOP won a long time ago.
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