A few days ago I got to thinking about campaign schools and how message is taught in the workshops therein. This was prompted by my reflection on just how crystal clear Bernie Sanders’ message is in this race. Then I tried to suss out what Hillary Clinton’s message is, and was unable to.

I shot a FB message to a political consultant I know who does campaign schools saying something like, “What would you say Hillary’s message is? I think I could recite Bernie’s message in less than 30 seconds. Hillary, not so much.” The response: “I can’t recite Hillary’s either.” Then a couple of days ago the European edition of Politico came out with an excellent article on the Clinton campaign. Here’s a quote from that piece: “Clinton has always suffered from a kind of political multiple personality disorder—and her message remains every bit as muddled as it was in 2008.”

How can this be? Bill Clinton is one of the most skilled politicians in modern election history. And there’s no great trick to developing a message. When we teach it in workshop, we tell participants to answer a few basic questions:

1. Who am I?
2. Why am I running?
3. Why am I qualified for the office I’m running for?
4. How will voters benefit if I’m elected?
5. What’s the risk if I’m not elected?

Textbook stuff and if you can’t answer these in 30 seconds total, you’re doing something wrong. Anyone who’s even been only half paying attention to this campaign could answer these questions for Bernie Sanders and like me, it probably wouldn’t take you 30 seconds.

The hardest of these questions, we teach, is always the second one: why are you running? It’s the question that Ted Kennedy fumbled badly in 1980 and it killed his chances. It’s one that Hillary has yet to come up with an answer to. And the problem is that when most of your political life has been spent calculating your positions so they do the least harm to your political well being, you quickly lose touch with any sort of passion that may have possessed you to become involved public life to begin with.