Just... sigh.

For the record, Ms. Walsh's using the word "many" (as in "many of Obama's supporters have" done this or that) is a common but convenient way to make an assertion without having to back it up by numbers.

I won't do that; support for what I'm about to say is entirely anecdotal and based on nothing more substantial than my own impressions. Which, of course, means it's at least as legitimate as what Ms. Walsh wrote.

Parts of this article, as is often true of Ms. Walsh's work, are fair and even-handed, and to the extent that is the case, I thank her and encourage her to continue on that path. As has too often been the case, though, one finds sprinkled throughout nuggets of assertion about Obama and/or supporters of his which are unsupported and which reveal Ms. Walsh's lamentable inability to recognize in herself and some Clinton supporters that which she decries in others.

Sigh.

So I'll just toss this out there, and you, Ms. Walsh, can take it for what it's worth. I know a lot -- A LOT -- of Obama supporters. I've been splitting my time between SoCal and Seattle lately, and almost everyone I know, whose political leanings are known to me, voted for Obama in their primary or caucus.

Not one of them holds older white women in contempt. (More than a few of them ARE older white women, including my mother.)

Not one of them denies that sexism has been an odious element in this campaign. (The majority of them probably are women -- I haven't done a head count -- but the men are no less observant of the sexism in the campaign.)

Not one of them disrespects Hillary Clinton. (Not even my wife, who is so angry at her at the moment that I fear for the safety of our television.)

Are there Obama supporters who say dismissive or even destructive things about Clinton and older white women? Who give short shrift to the media's poor treatment, in quite a few instances, of her, whether out of sexism or any other motivation? Of course. Do they represent a majority of Obama supporters? A plurality? Even a significant minority?

From what I can tell, not a chance.

And yet you and others keep tossing that bomb out there. As if there aren't plenty of examples of parallel behavior going on on the Clinton side. As if any of these outliers is representative of anything significant other than the inevitable pain of change.

Which is the bottom-line problem.

Obama ran a campaign in which he never once asked for anyone's vote because he was black. (Subtextually, of course, he was asking for some people to vote for him in spite of his being black.)

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, eventually trumpeted her gender as a cause celebre -- ultimately, into the biggest reason TO vote for her. You even criticize her for not doing this soon enough, in fact.

What you don't seem to understand, and have never dealt with in a blog or comment that I'm aware of, is that THAT DIFFERENCE is why a slim majority of us prefer him to her.

Maybe it's generational, maybe it's something else. I don't know. I'm not that much younger than you, I think, so that argument strikes me as insufficient.

Regardless, what Obama's narrow but solid victory demonstrates is that there is a huge thirst in many Americans to stop defining politics and social policy in terms of the categories we all belong in. (Maybe because so many of us can be catgorized in more than one way.) The Democratic Party has been hamstrung by identity politics since 1968, the year I was born. I'm tired of it. A lot of us are tired of it. You and Hillary Clinton and quite a few of her supporters are clearly not tired of it, and I feel sad for you, even as I can and do sympathize.

But time marches on, and things change. The irrefuted and irrefutable facts are that Obama's campaign was literally post-racial, to the extent he was allowed by the country to conduct it as such. Clinton's campaign was anything but post-gender. A considerable number of her supporters did not wish it so, and still don't. She made a choice to play to that sentiment, which certainly gained her some votes and hardcore adherents, even as it repelled many others.

Until you fully comprehend the significance of that most salient element of this extraordinary year, and write about it, you're just spinning your wheels and wasting your (and our) time pining for a sociopolitical status quo whose time has passed.

I, for one, will not grieve.

My hat is off to Rebecca Traister. This is a magnificent piece of opinion and commentary which gallops fearlessly into the foaming chop of nuance and complexity surrounding and threatening to drown these issues. Exquisitely mature and well thought-through, it gives the lie to Joan Walsh's simplistic and blinkered screeds with the force of a wrestler slamming his opponent to the map, proving with seeming effortlessness that one can support a candidate without being blind to her faults or to her opponent's virtues. It is Salon at its finest.

And that's coming from an Obama guy.

Traister for Editor-in-Chief!

Simply brilliant.

"The setting was grand, with people hanging over balconies in Washington's Museum of Buildings..."

Sorry Rebecca, its The National Building Museum.

Little things like calling something by it's correct name matter.

Yes. And "its" is a possessive pronoun, and "it's" is a contraction of "it is." Little things like using words correctly matter, too. Before you call in the Trivia Squad EMTs over the mote in Ms. Traister's eye, Ken, you might consider getting that beam in your own looked at by a specialist.

Pedant, heal thyself.