The Clinton campaign and race
13 03 2008
Yesterday, former U.S. Democratic Vice Presidential candidate, Gerldine Ferraro, was force to step down from her position as a member of Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign finance committee after she said that Senator Barack Obama, Clinton’s main adversary, would not be in the position he is in the Democratic presidential nomination race were he not an African American man.
On 7 March 2007, in an interview with a small local newspaper in Califiornia, the Democrat’s 1984 Vice Presidential nominee said,
“I think what America feels about a woman becoming president takes a very secondary place to Obama’s campaign - to a kind of campaign that it would be hard for anyone to run against.
“For one thing, you have the press, which has been uniquely hard on [Senator Clinton]. It’s been a very sexist media. Some just don’t like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign.
“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” she continued. “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.”
Clinton has already sought to distance herself from Ferrero’s remarks by saying she “rejects” them but it took more than four days for Ferrero to voluntarily resign from Clinton’s campaign team. Obama has said he thinks the remarks are “absurd”. In light of the Ferraro row, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, one of that U.S. news channel’s best known news anchors and commentators, has launched a stinging attack on Ferraro and the Clinton campaign’s use of the “race” issue which can be viewed below.
