A new Pew Research Center poll points to a surging tide of fury, especially among white women. As recently as April, this group preferred Obama over the presumptive Republican nominee John McCain by three percentage points. By May, McCain had an eight-point lead among white women.
What's dangerous for the Democratic Party is that, for many women, the eye of the storm has moved beyond Hillary or anything she does at this point.
The offense has turned personal.
They are now in their own orbit, having abandoned popular Democratic Web sites that reveled in crude anti-Hillary outpourings - and established new ones on which they trade stories of the Obama people's nastiness.
But worse than the online malice has been the affronts to their faces.
Tara Wooters, 39, a mother from Portland, Ore., told me that wearing a Hillary sticker around town has become an act of defiance. She recalls one young man telling her, "I'd rather vote for a black man than a menopausal woman."
"We don't hurl insulting, berating remarks at Obama supporters, or at Obama himself or his family," Debbie Head, 40, from Austin, Texas, complained to me.
Remember Peggy Agar?
The women do. They can't stop talking about the Detroit TV reporter who asked Obama a serious question at a Chrysler factory - "How are you going to help American autoworkers?" - to which he answered, "Hold on a second, sweetie."
The women are angry at the ludicrous charges of racism leveled against Clinton by the Obama camp - amplified in the supposedly respectable media - and projected onto themselves.
Jean B. Grillo, an "over-50" writer in Lower Manhattan, was pretty straightforward: "I am so tired as a white, ultra-liberal, McGovern-voting, civil-rights-marching, anti-war-fighting highly educated professional woman who totally supports Hillary Clinton to be attacked and vilified as racist and/or dumb."
