I'm a news junkie. I read the Washington Post every morning, listen to NPR during the day, read political blogs as often as possible and catch the nightly news reports at dinner time. Last night, of course, the top story on network news was soon to be former NY Governor Eliot Spitzer's fall from grace. As a native New Yorker, I may post on that sometime soon, but for now, I'd like to focus on what I saw on the NBC Nightly newscast.
Ann Curry was hosting, and maybe 10 minutes into the program, she mentioned the controversy surrounding onetime Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro's comments regarding Barack Obama. Here's what she said:
"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."
Her performance on the Nightly News was nothing short of a train wreck. She was absolutely awful - defensive, pushy, arrogant and claimed that she was the victim of a smear by the Obama campaign. In short, she personified every negative quality people think Hillary Clinton has. And Gerry? You're not the victim here - you're the perpetrator.
[As an aside, let me say this: I like Geraldine Ferraro. I was a freshman in High School when she and Walter Mondale ran against Reagan/Bush in 1984. I was a trumpeter in the high school band, and our band was selected to perform at a Reagan rally at the Rochester, NY War Memorial in the fall of '84. Despite coming from a long lineage of Republicans, I knew then that I was a Democrat. I didn't want to go to the rally and asked the band leader if I could skip out on the event. He laughed and told me "You're going." So I went - with my Mondale/Ferraro button proudly pinned to my band uniform. ]
Sadly, Geraldine Ferraro's comments about Obama were not an isolated incident - she's made that point about him specifically over the past few months. She's also made similar comments other black politicians in the past - including in '88 when she said that (in reference to Jesse Jackson's "radical" views), "If Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the race."
I think that's why her comments bother me so much. First of all, they're preposterous. As Obama himself said
"I don't think Geraldine Ferraro's comments have any place in our politics or in the Democratic Party. They are divisive," he told the Allentown Morning Call. "I think anybody who understands the history of this country knows they are patently absurd. And I would expect that the same way those comments don't have a place in my campaign, they shouldn't have a place in Sen. Clinton's, either," he added.
I tend to think Ferraro's smarter than her comments, or at least, she should be. She has to know how her comments will be used by the opposition. The Republicans are sitting back watching us eat our own, taking notes and deciding what to use against us in the fall. I fault the Clinton campaign - why do you have your surrogates attack Obama for being black (Bill Clinton in South Carolina), why do you have your surrogates send out phony emails about Obama's "Muslim upbringing" (staffers in Iowa), and why are you producing things like the "3 am" ad against Obama? You're writing the attack ads that McBush will use against Obama (should he be the nominee) in the fall. Your surrogates are writing the attack lines that McBush will say about him in the fall. The Clinton team has apparently decided on a "scorched earth" strategy - they must completely destroy Barack Obama to win, and if Obama wins, he's such damaged goods that he's doomed to fail in November.
I'm glad Geraldine Ferraro has stepped down from whatever role she had in the Clinton camp. If her performance on the NBC news was similar to the performance she gave on the other networks, then she deserved to be fired, let go, or whatever else the campaign could do to her. And no playing the victim card. You said what you said, and based on what I saw last night, you completely stand by your words. People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, and she's been around politics long enough to know that.
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