A Woman Scorned

Excellent point from Frank Rich:

Now, there’s no question that men played a big role in Mrs. Clinton’s narrow loss, starting with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Mark Penn. And the evidence of misogyny in the press and elsewhere is irrefutable, even if it was not the determinative factor in the race. But the notion that all female Clinton supporters became “angry white women” once their candidate lost — to the hysterical extreme where even lifelong Democrats would desert their own party en masse — is itself a sexist stereotype. That’s why some of the same talking heads and Republican operatives who gleefully insulted Mrs. Clinton are now peddling this fable on such flimsy anecdotal evidence.

Exactly. In a country of 300 million people, there are bound to be some folks whose preference order is Clinton-McCain-Obama. And some of those people will be women. But the idea that Democratic women would defect en masse to the GOP in a fit of pique is a preposterous notion that seems to be founded on the underlying assumption that women can't respond to their political choices as rationally as men can. Needless to say, as Rich goes on to point out the thus-far available polling shows us the traditional gender gap where the party whose agenda is more favorable to the interests of women gets more support from women.