Now that it is becoming increasingly clear that Hillary Clinton will be our first female president, a similar meme is beginning to develop about her. I expect that it will only take root and grow once the election is over. While it’s true that Clinton has faced an opponent who is the most unfit person to have ever been nominated by a major political party, to claim that is the only reason for her success is to engage in the same level of sexism as the racism at the root of claims that Obama was lucky. It completely overshadows the competence that we’ve seen exhibited by both the candidate and her campaign.

As someone who was very critical of the kind of campaign Clinton waged in the 2008 primary, I have been impressed over and over again with how well things have been run this time around. She brought together a young diverse team that initially built a firewall with people (especially women) of color to win the primaries – advancing what Obama did against her in 2008. Leading up to the convention, they worked with Sanders and his supporters to develop the most progressive Democratic platform in modern history and have done excellent outreach with the millennials who had initially gravitated to his campaign. While it is true that one of Clinton’s major liabilities has been her lack of soaring oratory skills, they focused on smaller events in which she could display her strengths. When it comes to ads, the product has been exemplary over and over again. Finally, I was perhaps most impressed with the campaign’s ability to be innovative in terms of organizational structure.

Now let’s look at the candidate herself. As Martin just noted, Clinton has dominated in the debates more than any candidate in recent history. A case could be made that this is because her opponent performed so badly. But the truth is, she faced some challenges that no other candidate in the TV era had to deal with: how to respond to a raging narcissistic bully. As many of the Republican candidates did during the primary debates, she could have tried to out-bully him. We saw how badly that turned out. Not only is that playing on Trump’s turf, it feeds the meme about “a pox on both their houses” and likely would have depressed turnout among persuadables. Here is what Clinton did instead:

She didn’t get angry; she didn’t get petulant; she didn’t give Trump a richly deserved slap in the face. Amazingly, she answered all the questions posed to her with a combination of wonkiness, empathy, and grace. She largely ignored Trump’s constant lies and somehow stuck to her game plan of not engaging with his bullying. Lost in the coverage of Trump’s crudeness, ignorance, and classless behavior, was Clinton’s debate performance — one of the most extraordinary in modern political history.