The real news in Hillary’s razor-thin victory in Iowa is not so much that she won but that she barely won. It’s pretty clear that the real triumph in the Iowa Democratic Caucuses belonged to Bernie Sanders, who back in May had only 10% of support among Iowa Democrats, little name recognition and who still as of January 2016 had raised less than half the amount of Hillary’s funds.

It also gave me yet another opportunity to pause and reflect on why I’m not crazy about the 2016 Clinton run.

On paper, I should be thrilled about Hillary Clinton’s campaign. She is a moderate Democrat and experienced through her time as Senator and Secretary of State (not to mention as a very active First Lady). And she’s a woman – I would love to see the United States have a female president both because I believe it’s an important milestone for the advancement of women’s rights and because research suggests that having female leaders may improve government performance for everyone, along important dimensions such as lowering corruption.

In the primaries for the 2008 election, I was a Hillary supporter all the way. I thought Barack Obama was too inexperienced and his campaign marketing at times was too messianic for me (though after he won the primaries my husband and I campaigned for him and I’m a huge fan of the Obama presidency- maybe more on that in a future post). Hillary was the tough, pragmatic and smart candidate for the tough, pragmatic and smart woman (yep, that’s how I like to think of me). I would get into arguments with my boss at work who was a super-conservative guy who loved to get me riled up about Hilary (he would say things like ‘It was great to see Hillary’s teeth get kicked in last night in the debate – she’s too old to be in those things”). I literally was crying when I saw Hillary giving her concession speech on the JumboTrons on the side of some high-rise in Manhattan (I was there for work).

So what is different about 2016?

It’s really two things for me:

• Where is the conviction and leadership? Reading the 2008 post-mortems on Hillary’s campaign (like this one from the Atlantic), a common theme was that she had a hoard of expert advisers who were perpetually in conflict with each other and she was more battered by the chaos than getting people in line. And I felt that it came through in the tone of her campaign – she came across as too wooden, reciting pre-fabbed sound bites that seemed the result of compromises rather than a true vision. While she appears to have made some changes in 2016, I still am left wondering whether she has enough vision and conviction that will be her guiding star, or if achieving the presidency itself is the overwhelming end goal.
• Is she for women? Granted, Hillary Clinton has a long track record of championing women’s issues in the US and globally (including the FMLA). But I found deeply disturbing the reports of how she and her family treated the women who came forward to accuse Bill Clinton of sexual harassment – who knows the conversations she and Bill had behind closed doors but it often seemed like she was mostly out to protect her husband and family with zero empathy for the women who came forward.

I worry that Hillary has lost her North Star – or, that her North Star has just become power itself.

To be frank, I know little about Bernie Sanders and his policy positions (my main reading about him was a Slate article about a weird piece he wrote back in 1972 about gender-bending sexual fantasies in heterosexual relationships). Ok, so I need to do more reading on the guy. After Iowa and where I am with Hillary right now, this might be a good time.