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.

Read more.

Echoes of Jimmy Carter in Obama’s Stirring Rhetoric

I’ve been watching CNN’s coverage of the Democratic convention and so far only one or two members of the best political team on television have made abusive, derogatory comments about Hillary Clinton and her followers and just for good measure, Bill Clinton.

I turned the volume on the TV down, took a deep breath, and returned to my keyboard to post a link to Sean Wilentz’s piece published at Newsweek. Wilentz, a Princeton historian, effectively assesses Obama’s failed attempts to launch a convincing campaign in the general election:

“Senator Obama's efforts to reinterpret the Democratic legacy have thus far amounted chiefly to promising a dramatic break with the status quo. His rhetoric of ‘hope’ and ‘change’ has thrilled millions of Democrats and helped secure the party's nomination. Yet millions of other Democrats still find his appeals wispy and unconvincing, and the persistent coolness within the ranks worries some party veterans. Democratic governors have already urged him to be more explicit about how he intends to adjust the party's principles to meet today's challenges.”

Wilenz calls our attention to the convergence of Obama’s rhetoric with this quote by Jimmy Carter:

"'Against this backdrop, how has the presumptive Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, proposed to revivify Democratic liberalism? There is a quotation that ought to give Democrats, and not just Democrats, pause: 'This year will not be a year of politics as usual. It can be a year of inspiration and hope, and it will be a year of concern, of quiet and sober reassessment of our nation's character and purpose. It has already been a year when voters have confounded the experts. And I guarantee you that it will be the year when we give the government of this country back to the people of this country. There is a new mood in America. We have been shaken by a tragic war abroad and by scandals and broken promises at home. Our people are searching for new voices and new ideas and new leaders.’

“Delivered in Obama's exhortatory cadences, the words are uplifting. The trouble is, though they seem to fit, the passage is from Carter's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in 1976.”

Wilentz concludes by asking a few tough questions:

“Can Obama, who lost the large industrial states in the primaries, deal with a troubled economy and become the standard bearer for the working and middle classes—the historic core of the Democratic Party that the last two Democratic candidates lost? Can the inexperienced candidate persuasively outline a new foreign policy that addresses the quagmires left by the Bush administration and faces the challenges of terrorism and a resurgent Russia? Can the less-than-one-term senator become the master of the Congress and enact goals such as universal health care that have eluded Democratic presidents since Truman? On these fundamental questions may hang the fate of Obama's candidacy. In the absence of a compelling record, set speeches, even with the most stirring words, will not resolve these matters. And until he resolves them, Obama will remain the most unformed candidate in the modern history of presidential politics.”

And this is where the Democrats are this evening as they kick off their convention in Denver with the media as usual sliming the Clintons and dissing Hillary’s supporters, while party hacks busily try to stifle any form of dissent in an already failed attempt to present a false sense of unity – democratic procedures be damned.

Read more.

Conservative Media Gurus Continue to Back Obama

The prominent conservative NY Times columnist David Brooks gave Barrack Obama his talking points for a presidential run on Oct. 16, 2006 in his column titled Run Barrack Run. And Obama has followed Brooks’ suggestions to the letter.

Brooks was followed up by libertarian Andrew Sullivan’s column in the Dec. 2007 issue of the Atlantic, the anti-feminist online magazine. Sullivan came close to plagiarizing the earlier Brooks column in his worshipful support of Obama.

Not to be outdone, in his first column for Newsweek, Karl Rove offered tips to Obama in his opinion piece titled How to Beat Hillary (Next) November.

The beat goes on. In today’s NY Times, Brooks throws his support to Obama again by suggesting that although Clinton has been the better senator, Obama would be the better president.

December 18, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist

The Obama-Clinton Issue

By David Brooks

Hillary Clinton has been a much better senator than Barack Obama. She has been a serious, substantive lawmaker who has worked effectively across party lines. Obama has some accomplishments under his belt, but many of his colleagues believe that he has not bothered to master the intricacies of legislation or the maze of Senate rules. He talks about independence, but he has never quite bucked liberal orthodoxy or party discipline.

If Clinton were running against Obama for Senate, it would be easy to choose between them.

But they are running for president, and the presidency requires a different set of qualities. Presidents are buffeted by sycophancy, criticism and betrayal. They must improvise amid a thousand fluid crises. They’re isolated and also exposed, puffed up on the outside and hollowed out within. With the presidency, character and self-knowledge matter more than even experience. There are reasons to think that, among Democrats, Obama is better prepared for this madness. Read More:

What are thoughtful Democrats to make of this heady conservative support for Barrack Obama?

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