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.