Clinton has managed to beat back the Sanders challenge — if not fully vanquish him — in her trademark grind-it-out, thoroughly uninspiring manner. Just imagine if Sanders had the media skills of a Donald Trump, or if the Democratic establishment had been less unified against him, or if he were a plausible general-election candidate.

They say of talented fielders in baseball that they “make it look easy”; Clinton makes most everything in politics, even defeating a manifestly unsuited rival like Sanders, look difficult.

She has been running for president on and off since 2007, and still has a proverbial “Roger Mudd problem” (the CBS journalist who famously stumped Ted Kennedy when he asked him why he was running for president). What is Hillary’s elevator pitch? She doesn’t have one. Her latest version of a signature line is “Stronger Together,” albeit with the caveat that “slogans come and go and all the rest of it.”

The truth is that Hillary is running to become president by default. She hopes that her campaign — assisted by associated Democratic groups and a sympathetic media — will make Trump so unacceptable by November that the public will have no option but to turn to someone it doesn’t particularly like or trust as the only alternative. She will win the unpopularity contest by losing it a little less badly than Trump.