Why are Clinton’s female supporters angry?

I’m about to breach a confidence here by sharing what a lot of men have been asking each other in private lately:

What’s up with middle-aged white women?

Why are they so mad?

No one likes to see their candidate lose, but the usual response is to feel let down.

In the case of many of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s female supporters, they seem ready to roll hand grenades into the Democratic Party and blow it up behind them.

It was on display recently at the Democrats’ meeting to sort out the Michigan and Florida delegate situation.

One woman there called Barack Obama’s presidential campaign an “anti-woman cult.”

A typical Clinton backer said of Obama, “I will actively campaign against him.” Many carried signs threatening to vote Republican if they didn’t get their way.

These are self-proclaimed feminists saying they will now go with John McCain, who is anti-choice.

Can you say “spite”?

My favorite was the middle-aged Hillaryite from Manhattan who raged to cameras: “I’m proud to be an older American woman. And the Democrats are throwing the election away for what — an inadequate black male.”

This isn’t about just a few worked-up extremists. Women have been saying this for a while, typified by Joy Behar, who recently said on “The View”: “A man took it away from a woman.”

This unsettles males a little. That’s why our observations have mostly been private. The first rule of men is that you never provoke an already angry woman. I’ve been in more than a few political conversations when a die-hard female Clinton supporter will walk by or join in, and right away, the men get quiet. We’re cowed.

Angry women

That’s fine up to a point, but I’m writing about it now because it’s not so fine to see how, more broadly, Democratic Party leaders are tiptoeing around so as not to antagonize Clinton’s angry women, even when they go on rants about backing McCain.

What bewilders many men is that supporters say she was done in by sexism. A new Pew research poll found that almost 40 percent of Clinton’s female voters believe her gender hurt her candidacy.

Clinton herself has talked about rampant “misogyny” in the campaign. And a San Francisco Clinton fund-raiser named Susie Buell said that Obama “has never apologized for the way Hillary has been treated.”

Men ask each other: “Mistreated how?” She attacked Obama relentlessly while he seldom hit back. But now women, including Geraldine Ferraro, are saying he’s a sexist who fought unfairly. Men don’t get this.

And since few dare to take it on, some of the clearest challengers of this “Hillary-as-victim” cry have been other women, like The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, who recently pointed out it was Clinton, not Obama, who most cynically played the gender card.

“For months,” wrote Dowd, “Hillary has been trying to emasculate Obama with the sort of words and themes she has chosen, stirring up feminist anger by promoting the idea that the men were unfairly taking it away from the women, and covering up her own campaign mistakes with cries of sexism.”

And Meghan O’Rourke of Slate.com said Clinton lost younger women like herself because, far from proving the special gifts a woman could bring to politics, Clinton acted like a swaggering male pol, mocking Obama’s oratory, comparing herself to Rocky Balboa, saying she would obliterate Iran, and painting him as an unmanly elitist who didn’t have the spine to answer the White House phone at 3 a.m., like she did.

Clinton and her backers are right that commentators, bloggers and others said sexist things about her. Just as many said racist things about him.

But in the mainstream race, if she was really a victim of sexism, that would mean Barack Obama, being a man, was able to get away with a lot more than she did. By almost any measure, it was the opposite.

Imagine the reaction had Obama won Florida and Michigan and, upon falling behind, flip-flopped and insisted both states should now count. He’d have been vilified as a typical man changing the rules on a woman.

Imagine if Clinton had been the better orator and Obama had mocked her for it, as she did to him. Or if he had run ominous ads saying Clinton couldn’t handle a 3 a.m. call. Again — a male diminishing a woman.

Had Obama said the media were racist pamperers of Clinton, he’d have been a whiner, but Clinton for months has said the press coddles Obama.

And there’s now a common cry that she lost due to sexism.

That’s not the reason.

Strategic mistakes

The truth is that Clinton would almost certainly be the nominee had she not made any one of the following strategic mistakes: Voting for the war, rejecting “change” as her theme, ignoring caucus states, failing to hire Web-savvy fund-raisers, overemphasizing her tough side or initially shrugging off Obama as a minor threat to her coronation.

I sympathize with Clinton’s core supporters — middle-aged white women — feeling devastated that their candidate lost.

What men don’t understand is the way many of those supporters think they got robbed due to sexism. And will get revenge.

Politics is rough. But this race at its heart was about just that, politics. Not prejudice.

I wish Clinton’s people would see that.

X Mark Patinkin is a columnist for the Providence Journal. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.