Newsweek Exclusive: Geraldine Ferraro on Palin, Clinton, and the Campaign

In a Newsweek exclusive by Pat Wingert, Geraldine Ferraro is the voice of experience in her response to gender on the campaign trail. Ferraro’s professional take on the sexism long endured by Hillary Clinton and what Sarah Palin now faces as the first Republican vice presidential candidate offers helpful insights in the final weeks of the 2008 race.

(Lest we forget, Ferraro’s words are also a painful reminder of how the Obama camp smeared her and both Clintons as racists in that brutal primary.)

Here’s the introduction to Wingert’s interview with Ferraro:

“Republican nominee John McCain's poll numbers have soared and his crowd sizes have surged since he announced he was adding Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to his ticket. But Geraldine Ferraro, the nation's first female candidate for vice president, says all the post-convention hoopla over Palin sounds very familiar. NEWSWEEK's Pat Wingert, who covered Ferraro for a Chicago newspaper when the New York congresswoman made her historic run in 1984, spoke with Ferraro late Friday.”

Excerpts from the interview begin as follows:

NEWSWEEK: The new NEWSWEEK Poll shows a 9-point swing for white women from Barack Obama to McCain since the Republican convention and the addition of Sarah Palin to McCain's ticket. What do you make of that?

Geraldine Ferraro: In 1984, when [Democratic presidential nominee] Fritz [Mondale] gave me the nomination, he was 15 or 16 points behind, and his announcement brought us dead even with [President Ronald] Reagan in the polls that were done after the convention. … We drew huge crowds. The Secret Service told me that we had the largest crowds they'd seen since JFK. But many of those people came to bring their daughters to see the first woman nominated for a national office. I would see these men in the audience with their little girls on their shoulders, saying, "You got to see the first woman nominated. This is historic." Hillary [Clinton] saw the same thing, and Palin will too. It was exciting and people wanted to be a part of the candidacy. But it doesn't necessarily translate into votes. The polls will flip up and down and it doesn't necessarily translate into making a difference on Election Day and who becomes president."

So you don't think having a woman run as vice president will inspire more women to vote for McCain?

People never vote for vice president. ...With Hillary at the top of the ticket, I think it would have made a difference. Women would have seen this as a historic moment that they would have carried through to the voting booth. But with the vice president, I don't think it works that way. People vote for the presidential candidates, not the vice president. In 1983, they were voting on how they felt about the economy and the cold war and national security, and they happened to like Ronald Reagan. In order to turn out an incumbent, voters have to feel that they haven't done a good job, and that was hard to do with Ronald Reagan. People loved him, and voted for him, including women, even though our policies were better for women. The truth is, Ronald Reagan was terrible for women.

Did you ever think it would take 24 years before another woman appeared on a national ticket?

No, I didn't. Remember, we have had a lot of women run for president during the time since 1983: We had Pat Schroeder and Elizabeth Dole and Carol Moseley Braun and, of course, Hillary Clinton, who ran the kind of race and raised the kind of money that allowed her to go toe-to-toe with these guys. I thought we'd see a woman run for president and win before we'd see another woman nominated for vice president.

Through much of Hilary's run, and now during Sarah Palin's race, there have been charges of sexism. Would you characterize the way the media, and or the public, treated you in 1984, as sexist?

Yeah, it was, but I couldn't speak about it then. When I was watching that interview between Palin and Charlie Gibson [on ABC, Thursday, Sept. 11], I felt like it was deja vu all over again. Only in my case, it was Ted Koppel and "Meet the Press" and "Face the Nation," and each of them felt like they had to give me a foreign policy exam, and ask me if I was strong enough to push the button. These were questions they never asked men. But in 1984, I couldn't say, "Stop it," because I couldn't look like I was whining or upset about it. Even when [the media was] so sexist to Hillary, and we said something about it, they still thought we were whining or acting like sore losers. It wasn't until independent people like the Paley Center [for Media] said the campaign was sexist, then all of a sudden, people act concerned about it. It was fascinating to me to watch Anderson Cooper, before asking a question, make the point that he would ask the same question of a man, and act so nervous about it. But I never thought we'd have the opportunity to see another woman go through it, this same election cycle, after the press had been put on notice. Personally, I thought Charlie Gibson was very sexist.

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