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Hillary Clinton is riding high in the betting for 2016, but this week was filled with reminders, if they were needed, that her dream of becomingAmerica's first female president cannot be accomplished without indignity. Officially, Mrs Clinton is currently enjoying her first spell outside public life for 30 years, but in practice her undeclared campaign is already filling the vacuum left by an increasingly marginalised and irrelevant-looking second-term president. While Barack Obama was off fundraising in California this week, it was Mrs Clinton who was drawing all the attention on cable news. First, Monica Lewinsky broke her silence of a decade, writing inVanity Fairthat she found it "troubling" that, as she saw it, Mrs Clinton "blamed not only me, but herself", backhandedly raising questions about the former First Lady's moral and emotional judgment. Then Republicans in Congress voted to form yet another panel to investigatethe handling of the Benghazi attacks in which two American diplomats and two CIA officers were killedtowards the end of Mrs Clinton's time at State. Mrs Clinton, who is certain to be called to testify, has already described the Benghazi episode as her "biggest regret" while in office, and conservatives will waste no opportunity to remind voters of a security debacle they say the White House deliberately tried to whitewash. Then there was Boko Haram. Mrs Clinton's tweet drawing attention to Nigeria's kidnapped schoolgirls under the hashtag "#BringBackOurGirls" was initially hailed as a demonstration of her global influence, with Michelle Obama and other influential people joining a spontaneous campaign. | 
