A long way to go

One of the hopes behind the Obama candidacy is that he can help put aside the concerns of identity politics--that politics can finally be about character and ideas instead of skin color or gender. But a trend that began in New Hampshire seems to have continued in Nevada:

Entrance polls indicated Democrats were split along ethnic, racial and generational lines. But women made up nearly 60 percent of those taking part in Saturday's contest, and the New York senator and former first lady led her top rival, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, by a margin of 52 percent to 35 percent among those voters.

For the life of me, I can't understand this. There are a myriad of reasons why someone can support a candidate, but I don't understand how gender or race could be one of them. I'm not trying to imply that all of the women who voted for Hillary did it just because she is a woman, but certainly some of them did.

If anything this shows how much more work we have to do before we will realize Dr. King's vision of judging people not by the color of their skin (or their chromosome count) but by the content of their character.