And it's all over.
After a grueling year of the Democratic presidential primary, Sen. Hillary Clinton dropped out of the race June 7, days after Sen. Barack Obama earned enough delegates to become the party's nominee.
And now that Clinton's bid has come to an end, we are left to speculate on the legacy of the first female presidential candidate with a chance at winning.
Her campaign was driven and aggressive, though at times short-sighted and overly hawkish. She made great strides galvanizing voters across the country and across economic barriers. However, her perceived inevitability got in the way of planning for a long contest. As she told George Stephanopoulos back in December, "It'll be over by Feb. 5."
But, as we all know, that wasn't the case. Super Tuesday wasn't the knockout punch the Clinton camp was predicting, and suddenly she faced a long battle she'd hardly anticipated.
And that is perhaps Clinton's most damning quality: her hubris.
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Long before Super Tuesday and long before Iowa, Clinton was simply the shoo-in candidate for the Democrats. As such, her campaign got lazy.
Time reported that Mark Penn, Clinton's then-chief strategist, didn't even understand the rules of Democratic primaries, insisting a win in California would net all 370 delegates for Clinton, allowing her to lock in the nomination in February.
When that strategy failed, the campaign found itself backpedaling through the spring, clinging on to allegations of media favoritism and shouting "Let the voters decide" in the face of simple mathematics.
Worse yet, the Clinton camp made the mistake of running on a platform of experience and inevitability in a season marked by Democrats demanding change.
Perhaps the best example of her miscalculated platform came at a debate in Texas. After it was revealed Obama borrowed speech lines from his friend Gov. Deval Patrick, Clinton pounced, quipping, "That's not change we can believe in; that's change we can Xerox." Then the crowd erupted in boos.
In any other election, that would have been a perfect debate gotcha-line. But in contrast with Obama's positivity, Clinton's attack looked out of touch. Worse, her campaign started to look like a political anachronism; she was running a 1996 campaign in 2008.
Now that she's left the race and put her support behind Obama, Clinton stands as both an inspiration and a cautionary tale. She ascended in the political world as no woman had before her, coming just shy of shattering, as she said, "that highest, hardest glass ceiling." But her bid for president also serves as a warning against resting on laurels and relying on political branding. For every "inevitable" candidate with experience and party loyalty, there can always be a young upstart with a talent for oration and inspiration.
Like, say, Bill Clinton in 1992.
