"Angry White Women" Aren't Mad: It's a Republican Pipe Dream to Think They'd Vote for McCain

Frank Rich had an interesting column in The New York Times Sunday in which he scoffs at the idea that women of a certain age who favoured Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries would shift to John McCain in November: “..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… a sexist stereotype.” He goes on to say that it’s not the Democrats who are in disarray, but the Republicans.

I’d sure like to think so. George Packer in the May 26 The New Yorker says something similar. If John McCain can pull it off, however, the world may really go to hell in a handbasket.

He will speak before a bunch of business hotshots in Toronto on Friday, and Chantal Hébert in Le Devoir today talks about what that means. It’s the first time in memory that a Republican candidate has made a campaign stop north of the border. Presumably he’s doing it to signal how committed he is to free trade, but it also is evidence of the close idealogical link between the Republicans today and Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party. It is not an allliance healthy for either country.

As for pro-Hillary women jumping to the Republicans—well, it makes you wonder what the media types pushing the idea are smoking. Bill Clinton said he didn’t inhale, but those guys must be.