“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.” I saw this yesterday and was going to leave it well enough alone, but since it’s growing into a full-fledged dustup today, and since Team Clinton recently made a point of calling for Samantha Power’s scalp: former veep candidate and Crossfire host Geraldine Ferraro makes some rather unfortunate remarks about Sen. Obama. To quote Ambinder (whom I generally find irritating, but he pegged this one): “Because running as a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama is soooo easy.” At any rate, if the door is now open to playing this ridiculous identity game, I think it’s rather obvious to all that if Ferraro herself was a white man, we’d never have heard of her, since her gender was basically the sole reason for her inclusion on that historically terrible ’84 ticket. Similarly, if Sen. Clinton wasn’t the spouse of a former president, it’s hard to imagine her still in this race, particularly given her virtual mathematical elimination and all.
Perhaps, before Ferraro makes any more dubious claims about an easy road for black males in our society, she should read Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson’s editorial today in the NYT, where he examines the old-school racial fears stoked by Clinton’s infamous 3am ad: “I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society.” Some pundits argue that Patterson is over the top here, but I actually think he’s on to something (and, note, I’ve recently defended the Clinton ad people on charges of intentional racism.)
As Chris Orr notes, this wasn’t just a warmed-over Mondale/LBJ Cold War leadership spot. Team Clinton explicitly turned it into an old-school home invasion ad, the kind that’s so passé that even Slomin’s Shield has moved on. The Clinton campaign still could’ve forestalled any possible racial subtext by changing the race of the family, but, as it is, you’d have to be willfully naive not to see a problem with the Clinton version of “Barack Obama is a menace that will harm your sleeping (white) children in their beds” as it came out. At the very least, the ad gurus at Camp Clinton are guilty of willful ignorance about racist cultural tropes in American history, and perhaps a good deal more. Update: In response, the Clinton campaign points to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her African-American child in the ad, although, given the lighting, that wasn’t immediately obvious, to say the least.)
Update 2: Ferraro blows a gasket, now claiming: “I really think they’re attacking me because I’m white. How’s that?” Well, if it’s any consolation, Rep. Ferraro, I’m sure your fellow national embarrassment, Sean Wilentz, agrees with you. (Patterson rebuts Wilentz here.) Update 3: Ferraro’s done this before, back in ’88: “If Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn’t be in the race.“
Update 4: “It wasn’t a racist comment, it was a statement of fact.” Ferraro can’t seem to stop digging herself deeper. At this point she’s either dogwhistling to Pennsyltucky or just completely off the rails. Either way, Keith Olbermann’s disbelief about Ferrarogate last night is worth watching. Update 5: She’s gone, and not very gracefully.
