I had hoped that we could get on with it, the presidential campaign between Obama and McCain. I understood that there’d been plenty of bruising all around, that there were hurts and disillusionment, anger, the sense of betrayal, not to mention the sort of emotional exhaustion which misplaces human kindness and empathy. Okay.

But the fact that the Obama candidacy wrested away a nomination Clinton and her supporters had taken for granted, and in so doing opened a lot of very deep wounds, is not the same thing as the Obama candidacy causing these wounds. It’s not a small distinction.

Last Friday, I had a long conversation with a campaign worker for the Democratic National Committee. She was going door-to-door in my hilly neighborhood on a very hot day. It was her birthday. She was 38.

We stood around the car deck, next to my cool ‘07 Madza convertible which the bank is letting me drive in exchange for interest payments. She said she was encountering resistence to Obama among women from my generation, women in their late fifties and early sixties, and she didn’t understand why.

We talked about our respective generations. She was 38. She hadn’t known the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr. She also hadn’t known the feminist movement in the late sixties and into the seventies. She had no personal memory of how the Equal Rights Amendment failed ratification, of reading the “Sisterhood Is Powerful” anthology and being stunned. I had.

Clinton’s candidacy embodied for millions of women a way to finally break through in a society which has systematically made things much harder for them because of their gender. I know we’re all post-modern, or whatever the fuck we are, but there are aspects of the feminist movement which did not get addressed by the affirmative action shell game, and these are the wounds this election campaign has opened.

America’s answer to feminism was to invite a few women into the club. There are women Senators now, and CEOs. A woman is Speaker of the House. These are fine things, no question about it. But women in general are still paid less than men for doing the same work. And women are still subject to gender-related insults pretty much on a daily basis, at least in the general population.

Women are still beaten and raped.

So I think it’s fair to say that a lot of women, especially from my generation, carry some justifiable anger around. Hillary Clinton was a way to fight back. Of course, not being a woman, I don’t have better than a cursory understanding of this phenomenon, but I recall watching Billie Jean King beat the daylights out of Bobby Riggs and being wildly happy about it. There’s a kind of deep satisfaction, however temporary, in nailing the bastards.

Clinton will not be the nominee, and she may never be President, however her campaign, flawed as it was, and her candidacy –– resting upon her most cynical of acts, her vote for war –– necessarily foundered, has changed for all time the prospect of women being serious presidential contenders. That barrier, win or lose, has been shattered.

I hope that those who were dedicated to Clinton because of what she represented for women can now recognize that what she represented is far more likely to come to fruition in an Obama presidency than under McCain.

Personally, Clinton lost me because of the war, not because she is a woman. I knew that she was smart enough to see through Bush’s horseshit, but she felt that a vote against the war would cripple her candidacy. After all, the war was very popular at the time. She was quite sensitive to the “not tough enough” charge any woman would face in a general election. So she set about proving how tough she could be, eventually even speaking of “obliterat(ing)” the entire nation of Iran.

I don’t want any more war Presidents. I’ve had enough. Even though the polls were in favor of the Iraqi invasion, a real leader, the kind America desperately needs now, would have stood against it anyway. And those who realized that they had been mistaken, such as John Edwards, admitted their error, and being able to admit an error would be a nice change from twenty-eight years of lies.

I don’t want Clinton’s supporters to “get over it,” as that disgusting saying goes. I want everyone who hopes to force some serious changes in the inequalities which plague us will continue to fight for them. And I think that in that fight Barack Obama is on their side.