Rather that come up with a way to convince you that we can win these older women over, I ask you Hillary supporters:

How do you win the general without everyone else?

Um, your stepmother is voting for McCain because she's mad Hillary lost?

Sorry, in a democracy, the person who gets the most votes *is* elected. You may personally find that the other losing candidate for whom you cast your vote is more qualified, capable, etc., but you have to accept that MORE people think that way about the winner and accept their judgment.

I will be very bitter if Obama loses to McCain, but at least I'd accept the preference of the majority of the people, even if it were a slim majority. Every one of us carries the same voting weight, and I am not "exceptional", even though I fervently believe that I am a better judge than others.

The thinking of your stepmother, and presumably that of these older white women you're talking about, is beyond reason - a "less qualified" black male wins over a "more qualified" female, less qualified in their own minds and not those of the majority mind you, and therefore this "less qualified" black male should be defeated in the general no matter what, that sounds completely insane and illogical.

Yes, your logic is impeccable. If one woman in America has expressed doubts about voting for Obama in the general, how can he POSSIBLY win?

Also, what does your step-mother think of Hillary being picked over more experienced men like Richardson, Dodd, and Biden? Doesn't that show favoritism for women? Doesn't that just prove...

REVERSE SEXISM!!

The problem is that your step-mother feels that there are qualifications for being President. There are only three qualifications for being president according to the constitution and the rule of law.

1. Be an American born citizen
2. Be at least 35 years old
3. Win 270 electorial votes.

Does are the qualifications? Anything else is spin by the candidates.

Your step-mother is using her gender and her experience and projecting them on to Hillary. Unlike a job we don't select the president we elect them.

Hillary has every political advantage a canidate could have but she has blew it. Obama has taken advantage os her missteps. The fact that she ignored caucus states and didn't have a plan after Feb 5th shows she wasn't prepared.

I support Obama. If Clinton wins of course I'll vote for her, happy in the knowledge that I voted for the candidate with the better policy positions, but sad in the near certainty that McCain will be the next President.

She. Can't. Win.

I'll be voting for her of course, if that is my choice.

Obama can win. I'll be voting for him, if that is my option.

I believe that he can win (defeat John McCain).

I have to believe that any Obama supporter who says he she will vote for McCain if Hillary wins is probably driven by sexism in some measure because the policy differences are so great between Democrats and Republicans that I can't imagine a reason for someone to support a Democrat and then turn around and support a Republican.

Likewise, someone who votes for Hillary... but then says he she will support McCain against Obama must (I believe) be driven by some degree of racial animus or discomfort. On policy grounds I can discern no rational reason to support Hillary... and then support McCain against Obama.

That's how it looks to me.

I was talking to my two aunts who are both around your Mom's age and they're both super angry with Hillary. Here's a direct quote: "Honestly, for me to vote for Hillary at this point, someone will have to go with me into the voting booth, raise my arm for me, and mash my finger on the button. Then I may have to cut my arm off." . On the other hand, I was out on Friday with a 30-something gay man who felt about Hillary they way your Mom does... would NEVER vote for Obama. I think your Mom is not so much representative of 60 something women as she is representative of pissed off and disappointed Hillary supporters - almost of of whom I suspect will happily pull the lever for Barack in the general, once all this calms down.

Hilary is not the "most-qualified". The most qualified are Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson. And the fact remains, the most important, and most loyal Democratic constuency is African-Americans.

Your grandmother's feelings as a long-time feminist are understandable. I'm not sure anything will change them.

For those of us who see Obama as superior in approach, ability and judgment, the situation this fall might be the reverse. How do you justify promoting an inferior white woman over a superior black man? If discriminatory hiring dominates your decision in the general election, then you can't vote for Hillary because "this is no different" from any other situation where it's unacceptable to give the job to the less qualified employee. It's just seeing discrimination based on race instead of gender.

Of course, hiring a nominee for president is an unusual kind of hire. It's not one person, bigoted against women in one instance or blacks in the other, who makes the hire. It is the voters.

Some voters will be discriminating solely based on race or gender, pro or con. But most voters will be "discriminating" by assessing a great variety of the candidates' personality traits, professed policies, and observed actions during the campaign. Race and gender will be nonconsiderations in some cases, secondary considerations in others. The assessment of the candidates' qualities must also be measured against what we believe is required to cope with the serious problems this country faces.

For me at least, this choice has nothing to do with race or gender. The issue in making myself vote for Hillary will be revulsion toward a candidate I admired a few months ago only to see her reveal herself in this campaign as fairly dishonest, totally self-serving, and, after falling behind because of those pesky people making the hire, eager to set Democrat against Democrat along racial and gender lines to squeeze out votes here and there.

There's another big consideration for me: the long-term political consequence of putting the Democratic Party in Hillary's hands and the hands of Penn, Carville, Wolfson, etc. In effect, that would give our two-party system two parties of Karl Rove. At that point, I might think the country's only slender hope is forming a progressive third party. This is the horrible place Hillary has driven me.

Hillary's professed policies do enter into the judgment. Hers are far superior to McCain's. But I no longer trust Hillary to support the policies she professes during a campaign. I do trust her to keep Democratic politics in the gutter if she wins the nomination and the presidency. I expect her to maximize partisan divisions and keep Washington a dysfunctional wreck. So voting for her is placing a bet that she will try to follow through on her policy positions, that she won't approach governing in the divisive way she approached her campaign, and also hoping there will be some decent remnant of the Democratic Party left after Hillary leaves office.

In my eyes, Hillary passes the gender and race tests with flying colors and the policy test with an above average score. On the character test, she scores above Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney and below damn near everybody else.

There's another issue with your grandmother's method of deciding how to vote in the fall. It's hard to see how voting for a white man strikes a blow for equal opportunity for white women. It appears to strike a blow for whites, period.

In this instance, the vote for McCain would choose a demonstrably inferior white man over a highly talented black man whose policies are quite similar to Hillary's. Given these facts, since your grandmother presumably likes Hillary's policies, you're left wondering if at some unconscious level race is the driving force in her choice, and gender rights is the conscious rationale.

The alternative is that just as I believe Hillary spectacularly flunks the character test, your grandmother believes Obama's character is so appalling he must be kept from office even if it means electing McCain. If your grandmother believes that, I'd like to know the evidence on which she damns Obama's character.

Obama gets a significant percentage of women's votes of all ages; fewer in the over-45 group. We have the habit of saying because any candidate gets the majority of a group's votes, they sweep the category. As we all know, that's not true.

Some 'traditional' first and second generation feminists may vote against Obama, and some will just stay home. But if Obama's the candidate, the vast majority of Democrats, including Clinton's supporters, will vote Democratic.

So I respect your mom's views but I respectfully disagree with her. If you simply look at exit polls and don't get stuck in the falsehood that if you 'win' a state by some percentage in a Democratic primary you'll actually lose that state in the general.

Obama has majority support among the middle class, those under 34, including women, blacks and many other people of color, and even significant support among Hispanics. McCain looks like more of an idiot with every passing day, and he'll look even worse once we have a candidate and can fight him full force. Many independents, concerned about the war and the economy, will swing back to the Democratic candidate, whoever they are.

For most of us black women, race trumps gender. Have you bothered to read Alice Walker's explanation for coining the term "womanist" in the first place?

Newsflash: some of these women (my age and demographic) see the world this way. Older women voters view the world through that particular prism. Older voters in general are more likely to vote race. Younger voters are far more post-racial than anyone gave them credit for before this election.

And this election is flooded with new voters. Voters who usually don't vote, are voting now all over this great nation. They will make a difference.

And here's a question I pose to you: Can Hillary win after squandering her deep support with black voters?

Obama people are supposed to wring their hands over the over-the-top feminists who protect Hillary from all attacks, real or imagined. And we just accept the total squandering of the black vote by the Clintons. Are they going to come back to Hillary in huge numbers? I think not.

I'm a white female, 57 years old and a feminist who never had any privileges like a famous name. I had my intelligence and talents and have worked hard my entire life. Obama will win back a good number of these voters, trust me. If Hillary doesn't take this to the convention so Obama has to run a two-front war in September -- winning Hillary supporters and fighting McCain.

To say Obama can't win without the over-60 feminist vote, is ridiculous, without balancing the argument with Hillary blowing the black vote.

And so horrifying people like me with the most dishonest, mean-spirited campaign I've ever seen from a Democrat. That it comes from the Clintons, who I loved and defended all those years, makes me very sad.

If you and your stepmom want to star in your own personal dramas, and cast votes that you admit are against your own interests, go for it. They are your votes, so do what you want with them. But please, please, spare us the faux debate about the "soul of the middle aged white woman"....You have already decided to vote for McCain out of spite, so what use is reasonable argument to you?

Sure it is spite... but what is the source of the spite? Simply sour grapes? I'm saying that sour grapes can account maybe for declarations of intent to vote for another.... but if you really overlook policy issues to vote for the Republican in the general there almost has to be some sexism or racism involved.

Sure I'll qualify it: "in the vast majority of imaginable cases."

Somewhere someone will swear in truth that voting for McCain against Hillary or Obama, after supporting one of the Democrats in the primary, has nothing to with sexism and racism. I believe that most people who will swear to that aren't being honest.

Sisyphus: If you show this comment thread to your step-mother, I'd be very interested in hearing her reaction.

What I don't understand is why Clinton supporters would be angry with Obama personally if she doesn't win. He hasn't personally done anything to Hillary Clinton other than running an agressive campaign for the nomination.

When Bush was reelected in 2004, I was deeply saddened and disappointed with the American people for voting the way they did; but I didn't blame Bush for winning. Should Bush have dropped out of the race simply because there were a large number of very strong supporters of Kerry who would not support the President's agenda?

I know this is kind of a strange way to make the argument and please rip it apart if I've gone apples and oranges here. I'm tired and have a headache, sorry!

I am a 52 year old white woman and I am an Obama supporter. As is my mother who is 88 years old and my 50 year old sister. I don't think we should make sweeping generalizations about woman and their lack of support for Obama. In my experience, it's just not true. In fact, I have spent the better part of the last six months trying to convince a number of men I know that Obama is the the more progressive of the two candidates and a better choice for the Democrats. I think your stepmother somehow misses the point of feminism by saying she will vote for McCain. I mean, what could possibly be more damaging for the woman's movement than four more years of Republican reign?

In answer to your question: he will win the old fashioned way, by getting more votes than the other guy.

I submit that for every woman like your step-mother there is one like my mother: in her 60s, lifelong Democrat and feminist, who has over the last few months gone from being a hardcore Clinton supporter, to undecided, to an Obama supporter, solely because she was turned off by the negativity and triangulation coming out of the Clinton campaign.

If you absolutely hate Obama but profess yourself a liberal, isn't the only sane option to campaign vigorously against McCain and then vote either 3rd party or abstain from marking a choice for the top-of-ticket?

Until the ghost of Reagan manifests itself to embrace Obama on stage, or Bush starts chanting "YES WE CAN, YES WE CAN" in blackface, I think you're no liberal at all if you can stomach a vote for McCain and the democrats wouldn't have had your vote in November regardless.

I'd urge you to reconsider your priorities. If you must punish the party and abstain from voting, fine -- but not voting for Obama does not mean you need to reward McCain and the republicans. That's not taking a stand against anything, that's playing right into Karl Rove's wet dreams.

This is a zero sum argument. If a person has this overall viewpoint then you would be choosing between two lesser choices or just sitting on the sidelines with a no vote.

The only way to break this static inertia is to pose a realistic cost argument. That is, what are the consequences if I don't vote?

The answer will be different for everyone but they WILL have an answer. Whichever candidate wins WILL have an effect on all our lives (Bush has clearly shown this).

There is too much at stake to sit on the fence. Not this time. Everyone has a "dog" in this fight. I guess what I'm trying to clumsily say that reality has no interest in any of our perceptions.

I'm not entirely sure, but I am hopeful that Obama can win without the resentful type of liberalism that you seem to represent, by putting together a coalition of the civic-libertarian minded from across the political spectrum.

Do you honestly believe that the Democrats can win without the Black vote? I have to ask this, because if you think Black folk are gonna vote for Hillary if she STEALS this from Obama, then you all are delusional.

I just don't get the upset from Hillary supporters. It's not like Obama has CHEATED to get where he is.

He outfundraised her.
He outperformed her.
He outmaneuvered her.

Fair and square.

SHE refused public funding as an act of INTIMIDATION towards other campaigns, because NOBODY was supposed to be able to out fundraise the vaunted Clinton machine.

SHE was the ' inevitable' candidate.

And then, when the people said, 'naw, I don't think so about inevitable', then suddenly it's ' sexism run rampant?'

How about some of us never ever liked Hillary Clinton and were just looking for a serious and viable alternative and here comes Barack Obama.

" It's all going to be over February 5th", she said, in the height of arrogance and presumption.

When it wasn't, she didn't have a Plan B.

How does that make her qualified to be Commander-in-Chief, when she didn't have a Plan B, post Feb. 5.

She had every built -in advantage that you can name.

And, she blew it.

I'd like to know why, when Hillary blew it, Hillary supporters are mad at Obama for succeeding, beginning from NOTHING, he built a bottom-up political machine, coast to coast, using the grassroots.

Explain to me WHY Hillary is ENTITLED - because that's the underlying sentiment I hear from this group - to be President of the United States of America.

Simple answer - VP choice of Kathleen Sebelius.