Katha Pollitt: Feminists for McCain? Not So Much

Are there feminist Hillary supporters who hate Obama so much they'll vote for McCain just to show the Democratic Party how ticked off they are? Yes, and I get e-mails from all five of them. Seriously, I'm sure there are female Hillary Clinton voters who will go for John McCain in the general election, but I don't think too many of them will be feminists. Because to vote for McCain, a feminist would have to be insane. Let me rephrase that: she would have to believe that the chief--indeed the only--goal of the women's movement is to elect Clinton, not to promote women's rights. A vote for McCain would be the ultimate face-spiting nose-cutoff. Take that, women's equality!

Not that the media will help women get it. As Eric Alterman and George Zornick exhaustively document elsewhere in this issue, the mainstream press is doing its best to persuade us that McCain is a moderate--barely distinguishable from Barack Obama--even on abortion rights, one of the brighter dividing lines between the parties.