Roland Summit wrote an article that has been amazingly useful for psychotherapists and their clients. He titled it, "The Accommodation Syndrome." It's about the plight of women, who, after all, have been grossly abused. They've been trivialized, marginalized, and otherwise degraded for being weak, stupid, playing victim, and must worse, and they have a long history of being treated as second class citizens, of which the "class ceiling" phenomenon is just one of many examples.

What's difficult for women to face is Summit's insight that childhood and adolescent abuse sticks. It has a lasting impact that is more and less difficult to work one's way out of depending on the severity of the brainwashing to believe that they deserved the degradation. One of the impacts is to become compulsively angry at men, compulsively in the sense that their anger makes too little sense in some specific instances. You see where I'm going.

There is a hard core of women who support Hillary that many bloggers have recognized but only in passing. I'm trying to focus on their realization that these women explain themselves by saying that it's vital to have a woman president, apparently without regard to the relative qualifications of each candidate.

Of course, they may be right. Maybe it is important to elect Hillary, regardless of her negatives and relatively weak positives in comparison with Obama. Maybe the benefits to our country of having a woman give voice to the concerns of mothers and professional women and much more outweigh the value of Obama. I think that's a formidable argument, the accommodation syndrome notwithstanding. But I think the value Obama brings is so vital that we have to elect him over Hillary.

In my view, Obama is not only a once in a life time candidate. He's unique in American history. Why? It's because of his feeling for people and his ability to express his empathy in intellectually credible ways. His speech on race captured perfectly the feelings of people that no liberal or conservative have been able to grasp. In so doing, he stopped what was becoming an inexorable slide into defeat. The much more important characterization is that be did a near impossible thing, he brought together two normally antagonistic groups, lower and middle class white voters too often degraded as racists and his natural supporters, the people who easily identify with him. This feat, which was foreordained in his work as a community organizer and in the Illinois Senate, is truly unprecedented, not only because he brought them together but because he did so in such and intellectually credible, empathic manner.

Some of us believe that, at every level of conflict--whether regarding abortion rights of the conflict with Iran--"realistic empathy" is the difference that makes all the difference. James Blight of Brown University and many other top scholars agree with this conclusion. Mediators and negotiators rely on it to solve some of the most entrenched local and international troubles. 

Obama truly is a natural, although, like even Mother Teresa and the most empathic psychotherapist, he goofs. We do live in a shaming, blaming world. But the depth and power of his empathy is entirely natural, as many analyses of his life have demonstrated. His mother, you women folks, gave that to him. She was a natural, a deeply empathic woman.

Perhaps feminist values would spread more fully and quickly if Hillary were president. I don't think so. The deepest, most powerful womanly value, the capacity to express transformative empathy even to one's enemies, is in Obama, not Hillary.