The Los Angeles Times offers a front-page corrective on Monday, with a report noting that women voters are moving from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama. Part of the end-of-the-primaries narrative was the spurned-women subplot: PO'ed female supporters of Clinton will vote for John McCain over the guy who prevented their gal from breaking the glass ceiling. Here's the money paragraph:

Now that the Democratic marathon is over, [female] Clinton supporters...are siding heavily with Obama over McCain, polls show. And Obama has taken a wide lead among female voters, belying months of political chatter and polls of primary voters suggesting that disappointment over Clinton's defeat might block the Illinois senator from enjoying his party's historic edge among women.

This is inevitable. Though enterprising reporters can no doubt find particular women voters who still are soooooooo upset about Clinton's loss that they will say they'd rather vote for McCain--or even Dick Cheney--instead of Obama, there's little reason to believe that women who supported Clinton will flock in statistically significant numbers to a long-in-the-tooth Republican who wants to criminalize abortion, continue the Iraq war, and trash-talk comprehensive healthcare reform.

So it's good news for Obama that McCain is using time and money to make a play for Clinton supporters. In a patronizing move, the McCain campaign dispatched Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, to host women-oriented events for McCain in Ohio and Pennsylvania. As I pointed out elsewhere, Fiorina is an odd choice as an economic policy surrogate. Her stint at HP was no success. A merger went sour, thousands of workers were laid off, the stock price remained low, and, in the end, she was forced out by the board. I wrote:

In this time of economic insecurity, there's not much about Fiorina's time at HP that can be reassuring to voters (female or otherwise) experiencing financial jitters. After six years at Hewlett-Packard, she ended up symbolizing not one but at least three corporate excesses: outsourcing, M&A-mania, and golden parachutes. Workers and shareholders did not prosper during her reign, but Fiorina made millions, got a book deal, and now is a top PowerPointer for a presidential candidate. She's a real American success story--for corporate Republicans.

Does McCain think that a surrogate with ovaries is all he needs to win over still-angry Clinton supporters? Well, his campaign has also released a list of "prominent" Democrats and independents supporting McCain. Prominent? There was one name on the list of 30 that you might recognize: former Representative Tim Penny, a onetime Democrat from Minnesota who in 2002 ran for governor (and lost) as the Independence Party candidate. The others on the list were not so prominent: a city clerk in Mississippi, an alderman in Mississippi, a member of the budget committee of Palmyra (a small town in Maine). No big names. Joe Lieberman still is the mega-fish in this small pool.

This 2008 race will not be decided by Fiorina's stumping or the endorsement of city budget committee members. The general election is going to be a rather stark contest between two candidates who each will have plenty of opportunity to make the differences between them clear. Women who voted in the Democratic party will by and large vote for Obama over McCain. McCain really has little to say to them about what they care about. When it comes to women voters, moderate Republicans and independents--especially the white ones--are the ones to watch.