1) for a variety of reasons - including being seen as a fickle, treacherous woman - Hillary didn't have the freedom to run against Obama's record and policies, so they became joined at the hip. Oddly, VP Biden wasn't so constrained, and his crappy little deathbed seance with Beau leaked to Maureen Dowd, combined with his pull-the-pin "consolation" speech didn't much enamour me to him.

2) Again I'll speculate that the Michigan primary might have been when Russians tested out their ability to make votes disappear. Not that Hillary couldn't have used more time in the white outback rather than just Flint water making the headlines (and Obama's help bailing out Detroit 7 years earlier should have been a strong pull, but "what have you done for me lately" rules our world, and Bernie's anti-TPP stance projected a world that'd disappeared, along with misstating the actual goals of TPP, so that like the misleading back-to-coal message in W. Va - it'd already moved west of the Mississippi and wasn't coming back - Hillary got burned by fake populist non-solutions solutions.

3) and yeah, learning to speak poetry...

4) Mook gets a pretty big pass for what I think was sometimes not the strongest performance. Though thank god she didn't re-up with her previous pollster - that was largely a disaster.