Even as Governor Spitzer struggled with the sex story on Tuesday, the Clinton campaign struggled with the envy story.
Geraldine Ferraro, who helped Walter Mondale lose 49 states in 1984, was clearly stung at what she considered Obama’s easy rise to celebrity and electoral success. Last Friday, Ms. Ferraro, who is on Hillary’s national finance committee, told The Daily Breeze, a small newspaper in Torrance, Calif.: “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.”
Obama acknowledged when he arrived in the Senate that he got more attention, his big book deal and his celebrity, because he is not white. He was only the third black senator elected since Reconstruction.
But as he campaigned here Tuesday, he was outraged at Ferraro’s comments. “They are divisive,” he said. “I think anybody who understands the history of this country knows they are patently absurd.”
Obama’s campaign strategist, David Axelrod, said that Ferraro should be removed from her campaign post, and that made her even more irritated. She told The Times on Tuesday night that she was “livid,” adding: “Anytime you say anything to anybody about the Obama campaign, it immediately becomes a racist attack.”
When Ferraro felt patronized by Mondale’s staff, she suggested that his aides “should pretend every time they talk to me or even look at me that I’m a gray-haired Southern gentleman, a senator from Texas.”
Hillary would never have to pretend to be a man to get aides to respect her, proving that she has moved past gender in a way Ferraro never did. |
