Obama's Race Has Kept Him In The Race

The first woman on a national party ticket and a Hillary Clinton supporter, Geraldine Ferraro, thinks that Barack Obama's skin color is what has kept him viable in the presidential race:

Clinton campaign finance committee member, former vice presidential candidate, and former Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, D-NY, told the Daily Breeze of Torrance, Ca., that, "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."

Of Clinton, Ferraro said that the press "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."

"I was reading an article that said young Republicans are out there campaigning for Obama because they believe he's going to be able to put an end to partisanship. Dear God! Anyone that has worked in the Congress knows that for over 200 years this country has had partisanship - that's the way our country is."

Yikes!

Ferraro has a good point when it comes to partisanship. The "Kum-Bah-Yah" crowd thinks that the political class under a President Obama will set all differences aside and walk hand-in-hand through the halls of Congress solving all of the nation's problems in harmonious unison. That's nonsense. We have two political parties because there are two different operating philosophies about the role of government in the lives of the people and no president is going to be able to change that. Partisanship is good for the country because it causes ideas on both sides to be challenged and the bad ones for the most part weeded out.

As far as his race goes, she's probably correct there too. There's a certain cachet in the idea of a black candidate rising to this level in the campaign and that is probably clouding the opinions of some who would otherwise more meticulously examine the candidate's beliefs and policies. John Edwards didn't have much more in the way of substance and his campaign went nowhere.

Jim Geraghty adds this postscript to the Ferraro story:

Awesome. Tell me again how the Democratic party is going to unify and forget about all this once they have a nominee.

Exactly.

UPDATE: Of course, here comes the calls from the Obamites to apologize:

(CNN) — A senior adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign called on Hillary Clinton to “repudiate” a comment by one of her top fundraisers that Barack Obama would not be a major presidential contender if he were not black.

“I think if Sen. Clinton is serious about putting an end to statements that have racial implications,” Susan Rice, an Obama foreign policy adviser, told MSNBC Tuesday, “…then she ought to repudiate this comment.”

Politics sure is getting wimpy.