The Clintons' egos each pretty much tip the scales into the range beyond any instrument's capability of measuring.
Obama will almost certainly win. The man is a new political force of nature - refreshing, intelligent, witty, and graceful.
He is an example of the best of America, and he has what the nation needs to begin healing its savage Bush-inflicted wounds.
He faces a tired-looking old man with even more tired ideas, including tired political ideas.
He defeated Hillary despite her decade and a half on the national scene, and a name recognition for her second only to the president.
As for the "feminist hero" business, Christopher Hitchens is not a man with whom I often agree.
Despite his eloquence, he is frequently quite wrong-headed, but in the following words, he describes a situation perfectly:
"Her whole self-pitying campaign, I mean to say, has retarded and infantilized the political process and has used the increasingly empty term sexism to mask the defeat of one of the nastiest and most bigoted candidacies in modern history."
Unfortunately, you cannot say such things without yourself being accused of being anti-feminist in America.
I do think a major source of this problem is what Robert Hughes has accurately called America's "culture of complaint."
It is a culture with an endless series of largely meaningless arguments over any issue.
And there are effectively full-time professionals making a living out of these movements without ever really getting down in the trenches and doing anything.
Women in all advanced countries have been progressing enormously during my lifetime.
I am an interested observer because my brother and I were raised in the 1950s by a hard-working woman. Hers was heroism greater at times than soldiers at war.
But it was the striving of millions like my mother who made this happen. It was not Hillary or Germaine Greer. Indeed, the careers of such leaders ride the efforts of those millions.
It is also the simple economic fact that advanced societies now need all their brain power. If you scrape the bottom of the barrel for the less qualified men, you are only putting your society at an economic disadvantage.
Give any group of people the education they need and then have new opportunity come along in your society for educated people, and you will see great social change, as we have been seeing.
Great changes always have great underlying economic forces at work. Speeches alone, without such economic opportunity, create little if any change.
