Campaigning in places like Cleveland, Akron, Dayton and Toledo—communities that have some of the highest foreclosure rates in the country—Hillary manages to fuse her own political survival with her audience's own struggles to get by. NAFTA-gate works wonders for her in places where so many jobs have disappeared.

On Sunday morning there's a "canvas kickoff" in a high-school gym in the predominantly white, small suburban town of Westerville, Ohio, which has FOR SALE signs on every block. She stands with her hardy brown ankle boots planted firmly center stage—the indomitable image of a seasoned, capable 60-year-old woman, handsomely groomed as always in her imperturbable (blue, this time) pantsuit, belting out bread-and-butter positions on health care, No Child Left Behind and college loans. "Yes!" she crescendos. "I've been around for a while, doing this work for 35 years, and I know it's important to have a president in the White House who gets up every single day and worries about your fears, your needs! … We need a fighter, a doer and a champion in the White House!"

If you dialed into the campaign conference call later that day, a platoon of generals told you why they were ready to salute her as commander in chief—so many of them that by the time she walked out on the stage of a school auditorium in Akron, you half expected her to be wearing a Kevlar top. Still, her best role will always be Hillary, the indefatigable student-body president, demanding, insisting that voters grade her for the specifics of her campaign promises: "I want to be in the White House and have you say, 'Well, we heard you in Akron but when are you going to produce those jobs you talked about?' " The scary part is that she means it. At a campaign stop at Herrera's Mexican Restaurant in Dallas on Election Day morning, Dawn Martin, the executive director of a small oceanic conservation society called SeaWeb, buttonholed me: "Hillary understands more about fisheries, climate change and the overall ecosystem in the maritime environment than anyone I know."

Much has been written about how boomer women have rallied to Hillary's cause (she won an impressive 67 percent of the white women voting in Ohio; they were 44 percent of the total). It's fashionable to write off this core element of her base as rabid paleo-feminists fighting the tired old gender wars of the past. But Hillary's appeal to the boomer gals is wider and deeper than that. Cynthia Ruccia, a grass-roots political organizer in Columbus, told me that in these last beleaguered weeks, women started showing up in waves at Clinton headquarters—women who told her they had never volunteered in a campaign before. "There was just an outpouring about the way she was being treated by the media," Ruccia said. "It was something we hadn't seen in a long time. We all felt, as women, we had made a lot of progress, and we saw this as an attack of misogyny that was trying to beat her down."

It's a revolt that has been overdue for a while and has now found its focus in Clinton's candidacy. In 1952, Ralph Ellison's revelatory novel, "Invisible Man," nailed the experience of being black in America. In the relentless youth culture of the early 21st century, if you are 50 and female, the novel that's being written on your forehead every day is "Invisible Woman." All over the country there are vigorous, independent, self-liberated boomer women—women who possess all the management skills that come from raising families while holding down demanding jobs, women who have experience, enterprise and, among the empty nesters, a little financial independence, yet still find themselves steadfastly dissed and ignored. Advertisers don't want them. TV networks dump their older anchorwomen off the air. Hollywood studios refuse to write parts for them. Employers make it clear they'd prefer a "fresh (cheaper) face."

Even Oprah abandoned them when she opted for Obama. Am I alone in suspecting that TV's most powerful 54-year-old woman just might have endorsed him so fast for reasons of desirable viewer demographics as much as personal inspiration? Certainly, no TV diva in her 50s who values her ratings wants to be defined by the hot-flash cohort.

What saddens boomer women who love Hillary is that their twentysomething daughters don't share their view of her heroic role. Instead they've been swept up by that new Barack magic. It's not their fault, and not Hillary's, either. The very scar tissue that older women see as proof of her determination just embarrasses their daughters, killing off for them all the insouciant elation that ought to come with girl power in the White House.

She might have a chance of winning them over yet, if she set about dividing the Obama girls from the Obama boys. Maybe start with some mother and daughter rallies in Pennsylvania, summoning an audience that would mirror the winning image of Chelsea onstage at her side on Tuesday night in Ohio.