The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Bad-Boy Image

Speaking of overshadowed men, and going back Hanna’s interest in pols who don’t cheat, I’d been wondering today whether Obama was perhaps squirming a little, and his staffers might be casting about for a way to cultivate at least a bit of a bad boy image. I mean, McCain’s out there boasting about his demerits at the Naval Academy, even as Maureen Dowd makes Barack sound like a sissy compared to Hillary. It’s not just that he abstains from chocolate (shades of Harvard’s head virgin, who forgoes dessert, too, as Melinda noted). He can’t bowl, and “genteely” sips beer from a bottle. On top of that, he’s got that Times article—the one speculating that he was actually a much tamer teenager than his memoir suggests—to live down. The obvious tough-guy image enhancer is out of bounds: Obama can’t come out swinging at the former goody-goody girl who lately seems more macho than he does, without appearing a hypocrite. But hey, a real alpha male sticks to his gentlemanly guns, right? A drawn-out primary can at least prove his endurance.

The Great White Divide

After Super Tuesday, Slate's William Saletan pointed out that Obama had made serious inroads with white voters, passing the 40 percent mark in eight Super Tuesday states. From last week's elections, add Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Obama tied Clinton with white voters in Connecticut and beat her among them in Virginia, California, Illinois, and Utah. Obama did this even though, until tonight, he has lost to Hillary among white women in every state except Illinois and Iowa. If you crunch the exit poll data for race and gender in 20 states, you come up with the following two-part rule:

1) When Hillary wins white women by 20 points or fewer, she loses white men. States this has been true for: Maryland, Georgia, Connecticut, Virginia, New Mexico, and California. Plus tonight in Wisconsin, where more than nine in 10 voters are white, Hillary won women by a slim margin and Obama walked away with men. (Exception to the first part of the rule, sort of: South Carolina, where she lost white men by one point with John Edwards still on the ballot.) 2) When Hillary wins white women by more than 20 points, she wins white men. States true for: New York, Arizona, Oklahoma, Nevada, Missouri, Louisiana, New Jersey, Tennessee, Arkansas, Arizona, along with an even split of white men in Delaware. Exception to the second part of the rule: Massachusetts, where Hillary won white women by 31 points, according to the exit polls, and lost white men by one point.

The 20-point fulcrum suggests that to win white men in a state, Hillary has to do really really well there. Which since Super Tuesday of course hasn't happened, and is getting harder and harder to imagine. Without white men, she has only won over all a couple of times, most notably in California. Hillary still has the solid support of Latinos: They broke for her strongly—especially women, but men too—in the four states I checked, which have sizeable Hispanic populations: Arizona, California, New Mexico, and New Jersey. But even in Texas, how can that be enough?