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Hillary Clinton lost women in both Virginia and Maryland tonight, and not by a little; nearly 60 percent chose Barack Obama. (Or Oback Barama, as former Maryland Rep. Kweisi Mfume just called him on MSNBC, which I'm sure made all those who've ever mispronounced his name feel better.) So, does that mean we're not her human firewall? Yes, it does, and here's why: Black women were supposed to be her biggest fans—remember the whole "women with needs" narrative?—only, they aren't. The new, amended story line is that, well, at least white women are squarely with Clinton—but even there, her 55 to 45 advantage tonight was an Al Gore-sized gender gap, not a yippee, a woman to vote for at last margin.
I don't think the point is that women are not responding to her the way African-American voters are responding to Obama—though that is true—but that no demographic is responding to her as it is to him. The guy won every income group, the Catholic swing-voters everybody said he'd have trouble with, independents by a mile, and Latinos. Which is a blow to identity politics but not, as I see it, to women; on the contrary, isn't it a testament to how far we've come that just because she is a woman doesn't mean she's automatically our woman? Yesterday, when a friend of mine said she didn't understand how any woman could decide not to support Hillary, all I could think was that that made no more sense to me than if she'd said she didn't understand not voting for the white person.
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