While I’ve been offline recovering from no sleep and lots of driving, Geraldine Ferraro managed to stir up all kinds of controversy.
In an interview with the Breeze, Ferraro 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.”
If “lucky” can be defined in the United States as someone who requires Secret Service protection because of his race (or middle name?), then… um…. sure. Okay.
Yes, Hillary Clinton also has a Secret Service detail, but hers stems from her status as the wife of a former president.
The Obama campaign is quite right to call this out as “divisive; it is “patently absurd” — just as absurd as Ferraro’s latest whine that she’s being picked on because she’s white.
No. She’s being picked on because she said something abominably stupid… or rather, she said something to the abominably stupid in our society. Just like Bill did in South Carolina — and their target audience is finally listening.
Exit polls revealed once again an emerging racial divide that has opened in the Democratic party between whites who tend by healthy margins to favor Clinton and blacks who overwhelmingly favor Obama.
Lovely.
Don’t tell me Hillary didn’t have a 50-state strategy. This has been played to a national audience all along.
And now that the racial polarity Clinton’s campaign needed is manifesting, her surrogates will no doubt begin musing more regularly about Obama’s viability in the general election.
Because he is, after all, the Black Candidate now.
Of course, he always was. It just wasn’t a central thesis of his politics or campaign… which left voters free to consider “the content of his character”. (*gasp*) It wasn’t until Hillary’s milky white hands began stirring up the muck from the bottom of the American melting pot that it became an issue.
This entire process both sickens and depresses me.
Hillary shows her true stripes. She will do and say anything necessary to get and hold power. I know that some of my fellow erstwhile republicans had the strategy of voting for hillary in the ratsocrat primary on the theory that she would be easier to defeat than Obama in the general election, but I think these people are sowing the wind and I pray that we will not reap the whirlwind.
Polimom,
Yes, the Clintons are trying to whip up (possibly) latent feelings of prejudice among less well off, less well educated, white voters. In the deep South there is some evidence that this strategy is working, e.g. Mississippi and Alabama. In other parts of the country, e.g. Wisconsin, Iowa, it has failed completely. No doubt they expect, after banishing Barack Obama with the help of a wave of bigotry, that black voters will obediently queue up behind Hillary (alongside those same bigoted white primary voters) and vote Democrat in the general election. Possibly, but then again, maybe not!
Even in Mississippi, though, there is evidence that this strategy is not working as the Clintons might expect. From the WSJ:
Obama can still make this race about policy, and not about race. It’s sad, though, that the burden of keeping it that way falls entirely on him.
Really, it’s time for the Clintons to slink away into the garbage can of history.
I think Ohio is really an anomaly. I visited Cincinnati in the summer of 2006, and there an aroma of racial tension everywhere I went where blacks and whites mixed together in close quarters. I freely admit that I thought when Obama commenced his campaign that the country was wholly unready to elect a black man president, but I am hopeful now that I misjudged our country. I think Hillary misjudges, too, and I delighted beyond words to see a glimmer of the end of the ratsocrat plantation system, whereby the whole appeal to black folks is the premise that they are too pathetic to do anything but look to the federal government for a handout.
A most stimulating post … along with the comments added before this one. There were more original “one-liners” and phrases here than I have heard uttered thus far by any candidate!
Good to see you back among the posting, Polimom!
By the way, it was my understanding (wrong?) that ALL candidates at the forefront of the nomination for the Presidency were accorded Secret Service protection. If I am correct, then Hillary would be receiving that irregardless of any prior status.
Hi Goldenrod –
Here is the Secret Service link. The short answer is no, they don’t normally protect candidates in primaries.
Enrico — while I don’t have nearly as dim a view of the Democrats as you seem to have, I am also hopeful that this country can finally start to get over its base race-relations history.