Geraldine Looks in the Mirror: Not Pretty
Geraldine Ferraro is reported to be resentful of the comparison between herself and the Reverend Wright. Her reaction exemplifies the racism outlined by Senator Obama in his speech. Ms Ferraro uses projection to defend against her own failures, which vividly contrast with Sen Obama's successes.
A comparison between Ferraro's resume and Obama's is instructive - especially since she stated that his current status is largely due to his race. Using her logic, in fact it would be far more accurate to argue that her fame is due to gender, than his is to race. Ferraro's claim to fame was her selection by Walter Mondale to be the first woman to run for Vice President in one of the major parties. Both she and Obama are lawyers - her degree was from Fordham, while he was the editor of the Law Review at Harvard. And there are more differences.
She never ran in, let alone won, a single primary. She twice ran for the U.S. Senate, but both times failed to even get her party's nomination. She did serve for 6 years as a U.S. Representative, even though she had never been either a Senator or Congressperson at the State level. (The U.S. House ethics committee did find against her for misuse of campaign funds.) She never showed a capacity for leadership, nor was she ever an inspiration to anyone. While Obama has been campaigning against the party's centrist leadership, Ferraro was their annointed candidate.
Even Ferraro's legacy as the "First Woman Nominated for V.P." is tarnished. While she and her husband skirted the law, she often responded with the "poor little wife, unable to understand her husband's machinations" defense. (Unlike her mentor, Lady Geraldine never tries to wash her hands of the money. She hoards the blood. No suicide for her.) As Wayne Barrett wrote in the Village Voice, while she was campaigning for the U.S. Senate:
The woman who would be senator has made a career out of hostile denials about the escapades she joins in with her husband. They got her in trouble with the House Ethics Committee and the Federal Elections Commission in the mid '80s. Her only response to the mob charges in 1992 was that they were anti-Italian. Her know-nothing defense forced the Times's Maureen Dowd to conclude, "She does not seem to feel that as a former prosecutor, a public official and a savvy woman who was listed as an officer in her husband's real estate company, she should have made it her business to know more about 'John's business.'"
Everywhere you look, and every time you look, there is another Ferraro scandal, as inevitable, it seems, as her teeth-clenched determination to run again for the public mantle she surrendered in 1984. It is an arrogance of entitlement born in a grand moment the women of America will never forget.
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