Obama has never gone out of his way to relate to women. Only seven of his top twenty Senate staff positions are filled by women (McCain has thirteen of twenty) and women on Obama’s staff earn 83 cents for each dollar his male staffers are paid. (McCain pays his female staffers $1.04 for each dollar he pays to his men).

From the very first moment Obama entered the presidential race, feminists resented him for trying to stop Hillary from becoming the first woman to be elected president. In the minds of feminists, the fifteenth Amendment (giving blacks the vote) competed with the nineteenth (women’s suffrage) for national attention. Even though women had to wait more than fifty years longer than African-Americans to get the vote, feminists were in no mood to let a black man get elected in place of a white woman, especially if her name was Hillary Clinton.

Clearly the Obama/Clinton race triggered ill feelings among many women and laid the basis for the problems Obama was to have in the general election. He won the nomination by beating a woman and then hoped to capitalize on the votes of women to get elected in November. As the race developed, the elbows got sharper and the rhetoric of both sides seemed to emphasize race and gender more and more. Hillary appealed for the votes of “white working people” while Obama lambasted and ridiculed her defense of guns by calling her “Annie Oakley.”

Although Obama always spoke of Hillary respectfully in public, it was clear to all voters that some ill will had crept into their relationship. After the primaries, Hillary postponed her concession for at least a week as pressure built on her to step aside. For his part, Obama seemed to snub Hillary, passing up opportunities to meet her and doing little to help her raise funds to pay off her campaign debt.

As it became clearer that he was not about to select Hillary for vice-president, the mutual animosity seemed to escalate. Obama made it clear that he would not even consider Hillary for vice president, ostentatiously refusing to vet her or to include her on his short list of candidates.

By early July, even as Obama led McCain in the polls, it was evident that his drawing power among women was dwindling. The downhill progression of that relationship and the steps the Republicans took to hasten its demise, may explain the true turning point of the 2008 election.