Post-Primary Therapy: Our Candidates, Ourselves

In the end, we wondered if it might be about ulterior motives.

Navigated that long, sagging Democratic primary and used the candidates as stand-ins to psychoanalyze ourselves and others.

Now the race is over. Hillary Clinton is scheduled to end her campaign today. But the wondering is still there, plaguing neighbors and co-workers as they figure out how to move on.

Julia Kaye voted for Barack Obama. But she works for a women's organization and is sensitive to gender discrimination. Sometimes she encountered male hatred of Clinton so strong, "it just caught me off guard," she says. "You kind of want to say what's really going on here?"

Was it about Obama's platform, Obama for the right reasons? Or was it about sexism?

Did these men also drive really big cars? Was Hillary-hating that kind of compensation?

It was a campaign of underlying meanings. A campaign where people asked who you were voting for but really wanted to know who you were. The two candidates are politically similar -- so a strong preference for one must be because of something else, right?

No matter how often you discussed His 'n' Hers health care, no one was ever entirely convinced that your vote wasn't all about you.

Nada Shawish is Muslim. When people learned she was supporting Obama, they decided that her religion was a factor. "I would just say, ' Are you ridiculous? '" says Shawish, a George Washington University student. Because, a) Obama is not Muslim and b) That's just . . . ridiculous. Then there was the girl who "flipped out" and cried gender betrayal, as if Shawish's decision revealed latent shame or hatred of women.

Not that going the other way would have helped. Just ask Shawish's friend Catlan McCurdy, a Clinton supporter. When some acquaintances found out who she was backing, "I got all of these weird innuendos that I must be a lesbian." (She's not.)

Still, people keep feeling the need to diagnose her vote, to put her through political therapy.

Shawish and McCurdy give each other a Look. "It got crazy there for a while, didn't it?" says Shawish.