A new CNN poll has found the reason for John McCain's rise in the polls: a huge swing among white female voters. Before the conventions, Barack Obama led among them 50%-42%. After the conventions, McCain leads 53%-41%. That's a 20% swing, a staggering shift, and there's no equivalent change among other demographic groups. Which means that all of us who said that no significant number of Democratic-leaning women would ignore Palin's far-right politics and support her just because of her gender were dead wrong. If this poll is right, there are millions of women who will do exactly that. And unless there's a major swing back the other way, they're going to give the White House to the Republicans for four more years.

To any fellow Red Roomers who prefer John McCain, I'd like to congratulate your candidate on his cleverness. To any who prefer Obama, I want to say that this needs to be a major focus of any talking, persuading, or campaigning we do over the next two months. Let's all take a few minutes to gnash our teeth and say that Obama should have picked Clinton for VP, he should have shown more respect to her angry female supporters after the primaries, he should have done (and be doing) a lot more to address women's issues. Then let's do whatever we can to get the word out that Sarah Palin stands in opposition to nearly all the values of the majority of American women. The woman who says, "Special-needs children will have a friend in the White House," slashed 62% of the funding for special-needs children's programs out of the Alaska budget. The woman who uses her pregnant teenage daughter as a campaign prop slashed programs for teen mothers entirely out of the budget. She doesn't even support legislation to enforce equal pay for equal work.

I could go on and on. You get the point. This is where the election will be won or lost. We can all understand why women who have never had a female presidential candidate to vote for, who wanted so badly to have the chance to vote for Hillary Clinton, would want to talk themselves into liking Sarah Palin. How can we make clear to those women the vast differences between Obama and McCain where women's issues are concerned? How can we keep them from falling for the biggest con job in American history?