Race and the Race for the White House

Geraldine Ferraro touched off a firestorm this week by stating that "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position....And if he was a woman, he would not be in this position." She also stated that he's very lucky to be who he is. The first thing that strikes me as ironic in these statements is that she's offering them while campaigning for Hillary Clinton. Imagine for a second how people would respond to a man running for president on the strength of his spouse's accomplishments. He would be laughed off the stage. The same is probably true of any person who had a similar history to Senator Clinton but who was not Hillary Clinton.
Much of the controversy over Ferraro's remarks in my opinion is not over what she said was true, but the reason she felt the need to say them in the first place. First, what she said is partly true. Let's pretend for a minute that instead of Barack Obama, you have Barry Dunham a white politician with similar credentials. He announces his run for the presidency in early 2007 after two years in the senate. His claims to fame are a great speech 3 years prior and a vision of helping the nation move beyond the divisions of the past. He's a great speaker who talks of "hope" and "bringing people together". Would he have generated the same kind of buzz at the outset of the campaign? Would young voters be energized and inspired by him? Maybe, but I doubt it. He wouldn't have had the same credibility when talking about moving beyond the things that divide us. So in this aspect his race did work to his benefit. I maintain that much of his original appeal sprung from the fact that white people do not find him threatening the way they did with Jackson or Sharpton. So from that standpoint Ferraro's comments were accurate.
However, that is not the reason Obama is beating Hillary. His race got people to pay attention at first due to the novelty factor, but it is his skills as a candidate (the ability to deliver speeches that connect with and move people in particular) that have put him in the front runner position. From the very beginning he has made sure not to allow himself to be pigeonholed as "the black candidate" which had it happened (as it may now be due to the Jeremiah Wright/Louis Farrakhan stuff) would have been the undoing of his campaign. The failure to come to terms with the strengths of Senator Obama as a candidate last December/early January are what doomed her campaign (and it is doomed, at this point I think she's trying to get McCain elected so she can run again in 4 years instead of 8). The correct approach for Hillary to take would have been to fire all of the over-priced cronies running her campaign in the wake of Iowa and to change her message from the fraudulent claims of "35 years of experience" it is based on to a more future-based message. This would have been the honorable way to go. Instead she has done what she does best: divide and (not quite) conquer. She has gone out of her way to fracture the Democratic Party. The strategy has been to play groups against each other: young vs. old, rich vs. poor, black vs. female, black vs. Latino, black vs. Jewish etc. The ugliest aspect of this has been the way her surrogates have played the race card from the bottom of the deck (not the least of which being her husband), so in this context Ferarro's comments make perfect sense. Try to make it a question of who have been victimized worse in our society, white women or black men.(by the way, by almost any standard you can use to determine quality of life in our society, white women have it way better than black men on the whole. It's not even close) The mistake Ferraro made was being too obvious about it. So for all Senator Clinton's talk about Republican dirty tricks, she's done a good deal of their work for them. I'll close by saying this: if I had to pick one standard-bearer for my race/gender, I'd take someone like Barack Obama over someone like Hillary Clinton any day of the week.