There is a series of clichéd caveats you have to get through when you write about this stuff: 2016 is a long ways away. Making predictions is an invitation to mockery in a few years’ time. At this point in 2006, the 2008 election was supposedly going to pit Mark Warner against George Allen.

But this time, Clinton really is a prohibitive favorite. She’s probably never been more popular, she’s already got a network of major donors and supporters, and there’s really no more exciting alternative. (Sorry, Gov. Cuomo.) As for her probable Republican opposition, it looks like the most formidable candidate might seriously be a member of the Bush family. (Sorry, Sen. Paul.) It would almost be stupid not to run, having put in this much work already.

David Frum says she’d be bad for the party, which is silly: If a party that has occupied the White House for two terms has a candidate available who is already nationally recognizable and broadly popular, they are in decent shape. (And she’s out of the administration, so even if Obama’s numbers tank in 2015, she won’t be held responsible.)

The question for someone considering whether or not to support Clinton in 2016 is, will a Clinton 2016 campaign pass the Mark Penn Test? The Mark Penn Test, which I just invented, determines whether or not a person should be trusted with the presidency, based solely on one criterion: Whether or not they pay Mark Penn to do anything for their campaign. Paying Mark Penn means you’ve failed the Mark Penn Test.

Mark Penn is a pollster and political strategist and amoral P.R. creature who is generally wrong about everything. To find out how incompetent Mark Penn is at campaign strategy and how personally toxic he is in a campaign working environment go to your local library and check out literally any book about the 2008 presidential race. For the basics, check here and here. In short, he had no clue how the primaries actually worked and constantly pushed for the campaign to go as nasty and negative as possible, and everyone hated him and he was bad at his job and eventually he was fired.

Fired, but still well compensated. Since Clinton’s 2008 campaign ended, she has milked her donors — and Obama supporters — for millions of dollars to pay off her campaign’s debt. $5.4 million of the debt — all of it, that is — was owed to Mark Penn’s firm Penn, Schoen & Berland. Anyone donating money to Clinton since 2008 has essentially been paying off the man who did more than anyone outside the Obama campaign to prevent her from becoming president. The debt was only just paid off in full in January, just as Clinton left the State Department and shortly before the new pro-Clinton super PAC began operating.