IT’S more than two centuries since George Washington became President of the newly formed United States of America.

Since then, no woman has even been a major party nominee for the world’s most powerful elected office, let alone president. Since 1789, 43 men, 42 of them white, have led the Land of the Free. So Hillary Clinton’s nomination as Democratic candidate for the American presidency is certainly historic. It’s also curiously unmoving – even among American feminists who’ve waited as long for a woman to triumph as black Americans waited for Obama.

Why is that?

Hillary has fought some difficult and important battles in her time. She entered professional life as a lawyer – just like Nicola Sturgeon, 48 places behind her in Forbes’s latest list of the world’s 50 most powerful women. Hillary founded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, became the first chairwoman of the American Legal Services Corporation and the first female partner at her law firm. In 2000, she became the first female senator for New York, and after failing to win the Democratic nomination in 2008, became President Obama’s secretary of state.

But of course, Hillary’s first and biggest moment in the international limelight had nothing to do with her and everything to do with Bill Clinton. His lies and infidelity hit the headlines in 1998 and made a laughing stock of him and, by extension, the loyal woman standing by his side.

Standing by your man may have worked for Tammy Wynette, but it left a question mark over Hillary Clinton’s personality.

What self-respecting feminist would stay with a serial philanderer? Did Hillary do a deal to get Bill’s backing for her Presidential run? It sounded fanciful until the long-running series House of Cards was broadcast. Creator Lord Dobbs said recently Hillary Clinton was the real-life individual closest to Claire Underwood, the ice-cold political wife in the hit Netflix series. Calculated and calculating – effective but perhaps not very appealing.

Far more important than being judged on Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions though, was her contribution to American welfare “reform” – reform as Iain Duncan Smith might know it, not the creation of the welfare state America has long needed.

In the early 1990s, the Clintons’ strategy was to lure white voters back to the Democratic Party by capitalising on angst about “dependent” black and Latina mothers on welfare and promising a “hand-up, rather than a handout”. As First Lady, Hillary not only cheered her husband’s goal to “end welfare as we know it”, but also whipped up support for the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which remade the welfare system.

Its impact has been long-lasting and overwhelmingly negative. According to American politics Professor Alejandra Marchevsky: “Today, the ‘reformed’ welfare system provides little safety net, and no hand-up. Instead, it traps poor mothers into exploitative, poverty-wage jobs and dangerous personal situations, deters them from college, and contributes to the growing trend of poor mothers who can neither find a job nor access public assistance. It is this failed social policy – not simply the recession – that is responsible for crisis-level poverty in the United States.”

And that failure has Hillary’s conservative stamp all over it. In foreign policy she’s also been a hawk – backing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – and presiding over the 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi that left the American envoy and three other officials dead. While that may seem old news, it’s been reactivated by the long running rammy over Hillary Clinton’s emails.

As secretary of state she set up an email server at her home in New York instead of using a government-provided email address and server. Innocent slip – she said. Suspicious bid to control information – said others. Either way it made her sole arbiter of what information should be turned over to interested parties, like the congressional committee investigating the Benghazi attack.

It’s all a bit fishy. If there’s a radical Hillary, she’s been undercover for a very long time. And that’s another reason not to get excited about her presidential bid – it’s been hovering around for ages. As one online commentator put it: “We’ve been reworking a version of the ‘first viable female candidate for the presidency’ story since 20 January 2007, when Hillary declared her candidacy. We’re exhausted. We’ve run out of superlatives. We’ve overused every anecdote from the former first lady, former senator, former secretary’s well-covered life. A woman president would be new, Hillary Clinton is not.”

Furthermore, she’s not a sassy, upfront performer. American journalist Jill Abramson recalls meeting Clinton, then Hillary Rodham, in 1978. “She was a sincere feminist and activist, but pragmatic. To help her husband win back the governor’s office, after he lost in 1980, she took advice to add Clinton to her name.”

Pragmatism is a useful quality in a 1970s governor’s wife but it’s not enough to make a presidential campaign sizzle. Especially when your democratic rival is a 74-year-old ballsy enough to describe himself as a socialist and your Republican opponent serves up nothing but sizzle in a never-ending torrent of insults, taunts and stereotypical put-downs. Of course, it’s hard for anyone connected with the establishment to land a punch on Donald Trump. So Hillary’s only hope is that quiet dignity finally trumps Trump.

This week, however, mockery seemed to be doing better when Meryl Streep surprised fans by “oranging up” during New York’s annual Shakespeare Festival. The Oscar-winning actress appeared with hairpiece, fake tan and body padding to produce what the New York Times called a “more than credible impersonation of Trump, down to the pursed lips, low-hanging belly and [swaggering] voice”. When you’re dealing with a pantomime figure, caricature works. But Hillary can’t take low swipes like that. Partly because it isn’t in her interests – but mostly because it isn’t in her slightly wooden, autocue-driven public persona.

An inability to rile Donald Trump doesn’t explain why Clinton has also failed to excite younger female voters though – most of whom are too young to remember 1990s welfare “reform” and have campaigned for Bernie Sanders this time around.

One newspaper quoted a 21-year-old African-American who supports Clinton but “misses feeling fired up”, as she was for Barack Obama. Another 23-year-old Harvard student said: “Bernie really understands systemic oppression. [Clinton’s] neo-liberal politics is pretty tired.”

Mind you. Maybe the requirement to excite is sexist in itself.

According to Lena Dunham, the writer and star of HBO’s Girls: “We never throw claims of too establishment or too stiff or even too selfish at male politicians. It’s unfair in the deepest sense.”

So what should Hillary do next?

There’s plenty of advice. Hillary Clinton must “own her inner bitch” if she is to appeal to younger female voters, according to the former editor of Vanity Fair. “Likeability matters, but authenticity matters more,” Tina Brown, former editor of the New Yorker said. More likely, she’ll wait sedately for endorsement by President Obama while the rest of the world hopes the least-worst candidate triumphs in November.