Geraldine Ferraro’s candid remarks about the way she views Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency illustrate some of the fundamental flaws of the Democrats’ fondness for dividing America into racial, sex and class constituencies.
Ferraro now admits she would never have been chosen as the vice presidential running mate of Walter Mondale in 1984 had she been a man.
She also asserts, as an active supporter of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, that Obama would not be where he is today if he were white. She also hints at sexism in his campaign and within the media covering Clinton.
“I think what America feels about a woman becoming president takes a very secondary place to Obama’s campaign – to a kind of campaign that it would be hard for anyone to run against,” she said. “For one thing, you have the press, which has been uniquely hard on her. It’s been a very sexist media. Some just don’t like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign. If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”
Is what she said about Obama true?
Of course it is. What is amazing is that few others have said it – out loud. It took a prominent member of Obama’s own race-conscious party and a champion of affirmative action politics to say it.
Is what she said about Clinton true?
Of course it is not. She, too, is a beneficiary of affirmative action politics – a wholly unqualified candidate whose greatest asset is the misguided notion that it is time for a woman to be president.
It’s almost amusing to watch this inartful spectacle as special-interest group politics catches up with the Democratic Party practitioners of this degrading, demeaning and exploitive ideology.
Now, perhaps, even promoters of affirmative action can see how the policy hurts the very people it is supposedly intended to help.
Even well-qualified blacks and women who get coveted jobs and positions will always be suspected, by at least a certain percentage of the public, of having been the beneficiaries of racial or sex preference policies. That is not good for blacks and women. And it’s not good for a society based on equality under the law.
It seems the chickens are coming home to roost within the Democratic Party, which practically invented this insidious form of socially acceptable racism and sexism.
All kinds of admissions are being made as feminists are pitted against black liberals. It took Ferraro 24 years to acknowledge what the rest of America has known all that time – that she was the vice presidential nominee of her party only because she was a prominent woman.
But she is disingenuous at best when she suggests it is just Obama who is a leading presidential candidate because of his race. Hillary, too, is a leading candidate because of her sex.
Neither one of them has anything close to the qualifications America normally requires of presidents. Neither has ever served in an executive capacity – not even in the smallest of businesses. Neither has served in a significant administrative capacity. Neither has served in the military. Neither has real-world business experience. Neither can cite any personal accomplishments for the nation. Both are neophytes in the U.S. Senate – one a first termer and the other a second termer.
Obama actually has more experience in elective office than Clinton, if that is a yardstick of competence and achievement.
One more thing on this subject – can you imagine the outrage Ferraro’s comments would have generated had they been uttered by someone other than a prominent liberal Democrat?
Had John McCain or Rush Limbaugh made the statements, they would have been quickly labeled as racist.
Why is it that people like Ferraro are immune to such invectives?
Why is it that membership in a party with such a long, inglorious history of racism makes one immune to being racist in 2008?
How is it that we have allowed ourselves to move so far from the uniquely American concept of individual rights to the highly dangerous notion of group rights?
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