Back in the spring, when Hillary Clinton’s numerically doomed campaign was lobbing anti-Obama fusillades on an almost daily basis, estimates as to the size of the pro-Hillary contingent that would vote for McCain or sit out the election routinely ran to 25 percent or more. In a nice bit of chutzpah, this purported intransigence on the part of vast hordes of Hillary partisans became one of the arguments that Clinton sympathizers marshaled to argue that superdels should go for Hillary: Otherwise our people will pout. (Or, if "our people" is Harvey Weinstein, we’ll threaten to torpedo funding for Democratic congressional races unless you embrace our Florida/Michigan re-vote plan.)

The no-Dem-but-Hillary contingent has a name now: PUMA, short for Party Unity My Ass. (Here’s one version of a PUMA Manifesto, and here’s a clearinghouse site listing friends and fellow travelers.) Rebecca Traister profiled the group on Monday at Salon. PUMAs come in all shapes, colors, and genders, she was obliged to point out, but mainly they are white women over 30, a curious amalgam of feminists, the less educated, and the elderly. Traister lays out 12 reasons PUMAs are vowing to defect, ranging from sexism and sore-losership to anger at Obama, Mark Penn, Bill Clinton, Howard Dean–even Hillary herself, for giving up the fight.

The subject of race gets only passing treatment from Traister (among their many grievances, PUMAs are angry that people think they’re racist), but there is a long history of antagonism here that goes beyond the bounds of simple skin prejudice, especially where feminists are concerned. My old friend and mentor Nellie Stone Johnson, a trailblazer and advocate for women and African-Americans alike during her 96 years on this earth, spoke often in later years of her disgust with feminist elements in the Democratic party who, in her view, made enormous gains piggybacking on the work of the civil rights movement and had done far too little to return the favor. "I didn’t spend all those years fighting good ol’ boys just so the good ol’ girls could take over," she would avow practically every time the subject came up.

The novelist and essayist Ishmael Reed has written numerous polemics about the racism of white feminists, including an ‘08 election piece written back in January, "Going Old South on Obama". Here’s a passage that should serve to underscore the depth of the enmity, which is not Reed’s alone:

"[S]ome of the suffragettes that [Gloria Steinem] and her followers hail as feminist pioneers were racists. Some even endorsed the lynching of black men. In an early clash between a black and white feminist, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells opposed the views of Frances Willard, a suffragette pioneer, who advocated lynching…

"Feminist hero, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, offended Frederick Douglass–an abolitionist woman attempted to prevent his daughter from gaining entrance to a girls’ school–when she referred to black men as ’sambos.’ She was an unabashed white supremacist. She said in 1867, ‘[w]ith the black man we have no new element in government, but with the education and elevation of women, we have a power that is to develop the Saxon race into a higher and nobler life.’…

"I asked Jill Nelson, author of Finding Martha’s Vineyard, Volunteer Slavery and Sexual Healing, how she felt about Gloria Steinem’s use of a hypothetical black woman to make a point against Obama. She wrote:

"’I was offended and frankly, surprised, by Gloria Steinem’s use of a hypothetical Black woman in her essay supporting Hillary Clinton. I would have liked to think that after all these years struggling in the feminist vineyards, Black women have become more than a hypothetical to be used when white women want to make a point, and a weak one at that, on our backs. It’s a device, a distraction, and disingenuous, and fails to hold Hillary Clinton - or for that matter, Barack Obama and the rest of the (male) candidates - responsible for their politics.’"

There’s plenty of historical basis for the PUMAs’ animus, in short, and no reason to think this contingent will go away in the course of a single election. But as to their numbers, the fear-mongering predictions of a mass exodus of Clintonites seems overwrought. In the LA Times/Bloomberg poll released yesterday, Obama holds a 12-point lead over McCain nationally and collects the support of a prohibitive majority of Hillary supporters (emphasis added):

"Among white voters, Obama and McCain are each at 39%, the poll found. Earlier this year, when Obama ran behind Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) among whites in some primary elections, analysts questioned whether the African American senator could win white voters in the general election. But the great majority of Clinton voters have transferred their allegiance to Obama, the poll found, with 11% of Clinton voters defecting to McCain."

So all seems well in Obamaland for the moment. Never forget, however, that the convention is still two months away, and more roiling of these waters by Clintonites, or Clintons, is hardly out of the question.