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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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Michelle Obama is no Nancy Reagan, either, and I think maybe all of these women are just trying to "pop'' on TV. But—shameless forced transition alert—whatever shade we're in the market for ... doesn't it seem like the phrase "shop until you drop'' is taking on an ominous new meaning? Seriously, we've become so used to this level of violence that it barely registers, but just last Saturday, five women were shot to death in a Lane Bryant store in a Chicago suburb. The very next day, three men were killed in what the AP described as a "dining, shopping and entertainment complex'' in Largo, Md. That follows the December tragedy in which a 19-year-old took down eight others before fatally shooting himself at a mall in Omaha, Neb. Not to be confused with the time earlier in the year when another teenager murdered five people at a mall in Salt Lake City. So my question is, at what point does our patriotic duty to shop run up against our God-given right to pack a semiautomatic? And as long as we're still mulling our presidential options, is any candidate out there ever going to have a single word to say about gun control?
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Back when that book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten came out, I thought about how everything I needed to know I learned in my 92 years of dating. And as it turns out, those lessons hold up pretty well in political life, too, in that chemistry and timing trump reason and a common goal more often than we'd like to admit.
Political life does not always mirror the real thing, though: If New Hampshire were an employer and Hillary Clinton a job candidate, she would have been out of contention the minute her eyes filled with tears during the interview. As those Sex and the City women (thank you, Trailhead) and every flesh-and-blood XX knows, men can throw phones and wastebaskets across the office and that's cool, but a woman who lets a tear fall is toast.
Which really might explain - sorry, but the instant Conventional Wisdom does occasionally get it right -- why women who could relate rode to Clinton's rescue last night. In future contests, I'm guessing Obama will refrain from gratuitous, way-beneath-him swipes like "You're likeable enough, Hillary.'' But that still leaves her with the same problem Al Gore had in 2000: What about Bill?
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For what it's worth, I think everyone will be heading over to a NASCAR race, but only after they get their immunizations.
We can only wonder what other cliches we'll be subjected to. How long before someone visits the Second Wives' Club to see if the gals are voting for Giuliani or Thompson?
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