“She’s a schemer and a planner and a plodder,” says the GOP consultant Rick Wilson, who worked for Rudy Giuliani during his aborted 2000 Senate campaign against Clinton. “You need people like that in politics, but most of the time they end up as campaign strategists, not candidates.” Buchanan is more blunt: “She reminds me of Nixon.” …

And yet, there’s an increasingly popular school of thought, especially among political scientists but also among some political consultants, that being a good candidate is overrated. Some even argue that it’s irrelevant — not just to what sort of president a candidate would be, but also to whether he or she can get to the White House in the first place. “Most of Hillary’s strengths and weaknesses as a candidate really won’t be decisive to the outcome of the election, in part because she’s going to be facing a candidate who also has strengths and weaknesses,” says George Washington University political scientist John Sides. Although there can be extreme talent differentials between candidates in down-ballot races, once you get to the big time of a presidential campaign, any candidate capable of winning his or her party’s nomination is going to be playing in the same league as his or her opponent. “It’s difficult in a presidential election for one of the two candidates to be clearly superior,” Sides says.

Academics partial to this analysis will grant that, say, Obama could rally a crowd better than Mitt Romney, or that Bill Clinton could at least appear to feel a person’s pain more than either Bob Dole or George H.W. Bush. But every nominated candidate for president since 1972, when Democrats lost their collective minds and put up George McGovern, has been highly competent (and each winner has had deficiencies that would likely have been more memorable had he lost). “No one thinks John Kerry or Mitt Romney were good candidates,” says Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, “but they both came very close to winning the presidency.” This is a testament to the elites in both the Democratic and Republican parties, who are always partial to nominees that are capable and electable. “They’re not going to put up someone just because they like and trust them,” says David Karol, a University of Maryland political scientist and co-author of The Party Decides. “There’s a baseline they have to clear. They have to be able to win.” It may take countless debates; the winnowing process of the primary may be torture; but, with rare exceptions, the loons always lose. “Ask Howard Dean” — the antiwar Vermont governor who briefly set the Democratic rank and file’s hearts afire in 2004 before the party elites smacked him down — “if electability concerns matter,” says Nyhan.