Clinton's tepid response to Ferraro is shameful

By way of necessary preface, President and Sen. Clinton, and the senator’s mother, and the senator’s brother, were of immeasurable support to me at the moments when these very commentaries were the focus of the most surprise, the most uncertainty, and the most anger. My gratitude to them is abiding.

Also, I am not here endorsing Sen. Obama’s nomination, nor suggesting it is inevitable.

Thus I have fought with myself over whether or not to say anything.

Senator, as it has reached its apex in their tone-deaf, arrogant and insensitive reaction to the remarks of Geraldine Ferraro, your own advisers are slowly killing your chances to become president.

Senator, their words, and your own, are now slowly killing the chances for any Democrat to become president.

In your tepid response to this Ferraro disaster, you may sincerely think you are disenthralling an enchanted media and righting an unfair advance bestowed on Sen. Obama.

You may think the matter has closed with Rep. Ferraro’s bitter, almost threatening resignation.

But in fact, Senator, you are now campaigning as if Barack Obama were the Democrat and you were the Republican.

As Shakespeare wrote, Senator, that way madness lies.

You have missed a critical opportunity to do what was right.

No matter what Ms. Ferraro now claims, no one took her comments out of context.    

She had made them on at least three separate occasions, then twice more on television this morning.

Just hours ago, on NBC Nightly News, she denied she had made the remarks in an interview; only at a paid political speech.

In fact, the first time she spoke them, was 10 days before the California newspaper published them, not in a speech, but in a radio interview.

On Feb. 26, “If Barack Obama were a white man, would we be talking about this, as a potential real problem for Hillary? If he were a woman of any color, would he be in this position that he’s in? Absolutely not.”

The context was inescapable.

Two minutes earlier, a member of Sen. Clinton’s Finance Committee, one of her “Hill-Raisers,” had bemoaned the change in allegiance by superdelegate John Lewis from Clinton to Obama, and the endorsement of Obama by Sen. Dodd.

“I look at these guys doing it,” she had said, “and I have to tell you, it’s the guys sticking together.”

A minute after the “color” remarks, she was describing herself as having been chosen for the 1984 Democratic ticket purely as a woman politician, purely to make history.

She was, in turn, making a blind accusation of sexism and dismissing Sen. Obama’s candidacy as nothing more than an Equal Opportunity stunt.

The next day she repeated her comments to a reporter from the newspaper in Torrance, Calif.

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