'Women Push Back in Support of Clinton'

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Mar 30th, 2008 NEW ALBANY, Ind. -- Debra Starks has heard the calls for Hillary Rodham Clinton to quit the presidential race, and she's not happy about it.

The 53-year old Wal-Mart clerk, so bedecked with Clinton campaign buttons most days that friends call her "Button Lady," thinks sexism is playing a role in efforts to push the New York senator from the race. Starks wants Clinton to push back."

The way I look at it, she's a strong woman and she needs to stay in there. She needs to fight," Starks said at a Clinton campaign rally. "If you want to be president, you have to fight for what you want. If she stays in there and does what she's supposed to do, I think she'll be on her way."

Amid mounting calls from top Democrats for Clinton to step aside and clear the path for rival Barack Obama, strategists are warning of damage to the party's chances in November if women — who make up the majority of Democratic voters nationwide, but especially the older, white working-class women who've long formed the former first lady's base — sense a mostly male party establishment is unfairly muscling Clinton out of the race. . . .

"My e-mail is bursting with women who are furious, and it's grown in the last week," said Ann Lewis, Clinton's director of women's outreach and a longtime Democratic activist. . . .

In California, Clinton bested Obama by a margin of 59 percent to 36 percent among women. She beat him by 54 percent to 45 percent among women in Ohio, an important general election battleground state. . . .

"My attitude is Senator Clinton can run as long as she wants," Obama said in Pennsylvania, which holds its primary April 22. . . .

Clinton insists she's in it to the end, saying a "spirited contest" is good for the party and ultimately will produce a stronger nominee.

"There are millions of reasons to continue this race: people in Pennsylvania, Indiana and North Carolina, and all of the contests yet to come," she told reporters Friday in Hammond, Ind. "This is a very close race and clearly I believe strongly that everyone should have their voices heard and their votes counted." . . .

"Women have always been asked to step aside if it was somehow for the greater good. In this case, Clinton, and a lot of her female supporters, clearly feel that she would make the better president and that it would not be for the greater good for her to step aside," Wilson said.