The very fact that she had carefully established close relationships with big donors and garnered the support of bigwigs made her part of a political elite and vulnerable to the anti-establishment rhetoric of the men she'd wind up running against; it kept her from being understood or celebrated as the outsider that, as a member of a gender that had been historically denied access to executive power, she was. In figuring out how a woman might win within a system that had not been designed with her in mind, Clinton had set herself up to lose.