Dick Morris Makes An Interesting Point

It's about why Clinton is still in the race, and may still win the nomination. From the February 6, 2008 New York Post:

While the apportionment of the delegates will distort her victory, the message is clear: Obama's surge fell short.
Once again, the polls proved to be blind to the single women, the core of Hillary's base, who flood the polls to back the possible first woman president.
Obama may inspire, but it is Hillary who quietly wins the unmarried women who struggle at minimum-wage jobs and desperately need public schools, mass transit, day care, health insurance and public services.
The political establishment does not hear their voices, but Hillary's victory on Super Tuesday is based on them.

Let me emphasize that Dick Morris doesn't like Hillary Clinton--and vice versa. I've read that much of the gender gap that dominated discussions of the last several elections was actually a single woman gap--that married women voted pretty much like their husbands (or vice versa), and that nearly all of the difference in voting was by single women.

I had imagined that single women tended to vote Democrat because of abortion (since married women were less likely to be having abortions), but Morris is making an interesting point that anyone who wants to win elections better think long and hard about: it isn't primarily the 25 year old woman with a professional career making $50,000 a year who is voting Democrat, but the woman whose husband or boyfriend left her with two or three children--and at best, a beat up heap of a car.

A conservative argument would be that feminists, by making divorce so easy, have encouraged a lot of men to flake out on their responsibilities. I saw the prominent historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese make that exact argument some years ago on Firing Line. She pointed out that for women like herself, with a Ph.D. and a professional career, feminism has been a very good thing--but that feminism has been a disaster for the vast number of women living in a trailer park, trying to keep their kids fed with little or no child support.

This is true. But it is an incomplete statement, too. There are a lot of teenaged girls who are coming out of disastrous home lives, who hook up with the first guy that is prepared to pretend to love them--at least until she's pregnant, and or until he finds another gal who still looks good. There are some steps that government can take that might deal with some of this--such as more aggressive enforcement of statutory rape laws--but at the core of the problem is that there are an awful lot of kids growing up in very screwed up homes. There's a limit to what the government can do about those problems, without video cameras in every home, and an army of child protective services employees watching all the screens--and pretty obviously, that's neither possible nor desirable.

I'm not seeing any solutions at the moment. But this underclass of desperate women with dependent children and sperm donors (I hesitate to call them fathers) is a real issue, and one that isn't going away very quickly. I am not surprised that Hillary Clinton is getting their votes; what is a surprise is that some of them vote Republican anyway.