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I am not much of a Hillary Clinton fan, and I think you might be overstating her qualities: I do think that she seems to have a certain negative charisma, and unlike soccer teams competing for a spot in the World Cup final, she actually never went through the lengthy vetting at lower political levels that most Presidential candidates do Her only elective office was US Senator from NY, where she ran effectively unopposed in the Democratic primary in a state in which the Dem nominee is a virtual lock in the general election.
That being said, another data point in favor of your argument is that she did exactly as well as predicted by models based only on underlying fundamentals of the election (i.e., that ignore candidates, polls, etc).
Your description of her Senate run overstates her case a bit. New York is seen as a Democratic lock now but in 1999 it was widely believed that Rudy Giuliani was going to run for the open seat, and he was expected to beat every Democrat who had expressed interest at the time. After Clinton threw her hat into the ring the field, such as it existed, stepped aside as the party believed that only a candidate with Clinton's star power would be enough to challenge Giuliani. So right off the bat, she had the crowd cleared for her and didn't even have to run in a competitive primary. Then, Giuliani's marriage fell apart right around the time he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and he decided not to run. Now she's running against Rick Lazio, who was less well-known and more conservative than Giuliani. And she underperformed here, too. Though she ended up winning by 12 points, polling was much tighter than anyone had anticipated; Lazio made it a real ballgame. More importantly, though, while 12 points is a healthy margin, Al Gore ended up winning the state on the same ballot by 25 points. In other words, a significant number of Democrats decided that they'd rather vote for a Republican nobody than vote for Mrs. Clinton. This should have been a prodrome for the future but the Democratic establishment never quite got it. It's no coincidence that when Democrats nationwide were given a choice they chose freshman Senator who had made a good speech a few years prior despite the "aura of inevitability" the party sought to create. It was no coincidence that after the part establishment sough to rectify this in 2016 by clearing the field to an unprecedented degree an old socialist who would have been a fringe candidate in any other election threatened to win the nomination, and was possibly only thwarted by the specter of superdelegates whose assumed positions made all media reports look like Clinton had the nomination locked up before the first primary.
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I agree on all your negative points, I really disliked her and most every policy she stood for. And, fwiw, when I say "Hillary" I think it's best to just include "the Clinton machine" or "Hillary's advisers" and "Bill working for Hillary" within the shorthand "Hillary." Because it's not really possible to separate them in any meaningful way. It's like using "Taylor Swift" as the shorthand for "Taylor Swift's musical production team" when talking about who tops the charts.
But I still think you're underrating the value of the behind the scenes wrangling she was able to engage in to achieve those stations of power without getting elected in an open competition. Tons of people would love to get parachuted into a safe Senate seat, she got it. She finished second in 2008 to a generational talent in Obama. She cleared the decks of primary challengers before running in 2016, her only opponents were joke candidates. Having the political skill and wherewithal to avoid having to fight a real primary is an underrated ability in America. It's like being such a dominant light-heavyweight that all your would-be challengers go up to heavy or down to middle because they already know they won't beat you. That's a singular achievement! Compare to Biden, who had to slog through a dozen idiots and a few good candidates; or Mitt Romney, who probably has a much better shot in 2012 if he doesn't get dragged for months by Santorum over his weak conservative Bona Fides.
In a similar vein, Mitch McConnell is the most talented politician of our generation, and he gets consistently underrated because it is almost all behind the scenes stuff, off camera stuff, that makes him great.
Yes, this is true; however: 1) As you note, I think this was more a function of the Clinton machine, rather than her per se; 2) I took the OP to be talking about her electability in a general election, rather than her acumen at negotiating intra-party politics and/or the [invisible primary])(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_primary)
So, ability behind the scenes, ala Mitch McConnell or someone who might well have him beat, Willie Brown is not the same as ability as a candidate.
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But is is really healthy to have such a lock on your national party that no meaningful opposition can run against you, you own them due to lending them money and having a firm grip on the pursestrings of campaign money so that you can funnel it where you want it (if the allegations are to be believed ), and your campaign is run basically on the idea that "it's my turn now, given that Obama stole my chance in 2008"?
I mean, it is great political machine manoeuvring to plan for years to run your campaign to get elected to the highest office in the land as your right, and to be able to get parachuted into a safe seat so you have the minimum necessary experience in office as yourself (rather than on the coat tails of your spouse) to run, and to have bribed/persuaded/terrorised other rivals off, but is it really good for the body politic no matter which party does it, in any country?
I doubt it's good for the long term health of the body politic, and you shouldn't throw hard sliders if you want to keep your original elbow ligaments, but we're not here for the long term we're here to win elections/baseball games. Saying someone who was a couple of lucky breaks from winning the presidency of the United States of America was a bad politician is a rabbit hole of constantly claiming that everyone is shit that leads nowhere useful. Somebody is good at winning elections because somebody keeps winning them.
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