Touche.
HRC's rise to power was weird, and pretty intimately tied to the collapse of the Democratic Party.
The warning signs were there in 2000 when Nader and McKinney broken 5% against Bayh. The Green-Progressive faction in the Democratic party only got louder from 2000 onwards. When the faction took the nomination in 2004, the Clinton became the face of the "Independent Democratic Caucus" in the Senate which endorsed Bush that year - likely to save her own hide from losing reelection. Bush wanted Cheney to be his VP, but Cheney urged hard for Clinton and the Unity Ticket popped out of that. With the Democrats way to the left of the mainstream, Bush-Clinton landslided that year.
Clinton proved to be as effective a President as LBJ, using the sympathy from W's assassination to push through the One Nation Conservative Agenda: Social Security Privatization, Medicare Drug Price Negotiation, Drug Importation, the Medicare Buy-In, Medicaid Expansion, and the High Risk Pool program for covering preexisting conditions. She rode sympathy, domestic successes, and the conservative and neoliberal faction of the Democratic Party defecting to Bloomberg-Boren to a landslide in 2008. Granted, the Republican-IndDem coalition supermajorities in the house and senate made governance pretty easy.
Then in her second term she was too preoccupied with the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Mali, and Syria-Lebanon and the collapse of the global economy to push a Domestic Agenda.
Then Feingold took the nomination in 2012, half the Democrats and a third of Republicans defected to Bloomberg-Locke and the IndDem Caucus joined Bloomberg's Reform Party.