Sherry Chandler

Ferraro

First, because Juan Cole thinks everybody should see this AP report of violence in Iraq on Monday:

Watch at YouTube

Now that we’ve had a reality check, I want to say that I have had a soft spot in my heart for Geraldine Ferraro since she ran for Vice President in 1984. I know now that Mondale-Ferraro was a Quixotic race, doomed to failure and Farraro maybe wasn’t the best choice for this groundbreaking role, but I still remember the thrill of having a woman on the ticket. So my heart may be getting the better of my head on this one, but I can’t help but feel that Ferraro is being demonized by the current brouhaha over her remarks about Barack Obama.

For some background, I refer you to Kevin Drum:

Well, sure. Except for one thing. Torrance is a faceless little bedroom community most famous for having a big shopping mall, and the Torrance Daily Breeze is a faceless little local newspaper with a circulation of about 60,000. Nobody outside the South Bay reads it, Ferraro’s comment was buried near the end of the original article, California has already voted, and no one in the Obama campaign cared about it. In fact, nobody would ever have noticed her remarks in the first place if Kos hadn’t highlighted them three days after they appeared. Ferraro’s moment in the national press didn’t start until after the blogosphere erupted.

If Ferraro was trying to do some dog whistling, she sure picked an unusually ineffective forum for it. It’s way more likely that she just blurted out something dumb to a local reporter, and then got her dander up when people started piling on about it. That’s no excuse for saying something dumb and then following it up with something even dumber, but it’s pretty unlikely that Ferraro had any serious dog whistling agenda here.

And for some perspective, read NYCweboy:

Much has been made of what Ferraro said; indeed, it’s hard to find people who actually discuss what she said, but instead focus on the meaning of what she said, adding layers of interpretation, and then creating arguments over that level of interpretation, rather than sticking to what was actually said; it helps, in this case, that Ferraro has said so much, and didn’t stop talking, but kept piling on. On top of which, the Ferraro Flap comes in the context of rising tension between supporters that’s making civil debate more and more difficult, and leads to a “trading scalps” sense of Ferraro vis-a-vis Samantha Power.

Moreover, I don’t want to discuss what Ferraro said, because I’m not sure it’s productive. More than the issues of race and gender she (rather messily) raised, I think Ferraro demonstrated what it is to be a New Yorker, feisty and confrontational, unwilling to back down. I’m not that New Yorker, and I think that we can get more done with less confrontation.

Where I’m going with all of this is that, as I think about it, the problem here is language. We are having a difficult and painful debate on issues of race and gender because we lack the language to discuss it, a language we’ve lacked for a long, long time. And rather than grope, artlessly, towards finding one, we instead, too often, fall back on silence, letting our discomforts drive our decision making.

That both race and gender are such hot potatoes in this Democratic primary says to me that we on the left have not gotten very far on either one of these issues. I am not sure that we always “fall back on silence.” I think sometimes we are silenced. Or demonized because, like Geraldine Ferraro, we (perhaps foolishly) refuse to be silenced.

I’ve talked quite a bit about race on this blog here this winter, until I started to scare myself and decided I ought to shut up. Because on this issue, we are reminiscent of the Jim-Crow south, when race was the elephant in the room that nobody talked about. And anyway, I never was very good at shutting up.

I think it may also be possible that the Leftist tendency to impose silence about race (and gender) allows the right to exploit the southerners with their “southern strategy” of winning elections. It’s all a bait and switch. Convince the poor white person that it’s race (or gender) that’s the problem when actually it’s class. Meanwhile, liberals in other parts of the country get to congratulate themselves that they aren’t as dumb as the rednecks.

We need perhaps less political correctness and more honesty. I was very touched to read this closing paragraph of NYCweboy’s post. I think he is spot on:

Our predicament this primary season, I’m convinced, didn’t “just happen.” We’re here, in this moment, at this time, because we were bound to get here, to a moment where the lovely notions of racial and gender equality meet the hard realities of people who find talking about race uncomfortable and prefer not to see gender issues rather than confront them. It’s the moment when a generalized notion of change becomes the actual, painful, work of changing. How odd, and how natural, to discover, right now, that words fail us. I don’t think we can just give up on a conversation for want of a language. We actually have to find one. So let’s.

Read all of his post.

And there’s this from The Sideshow:

The Clintons, of course, have no reason whatsoever to race-bait; it cannot possibly do them any good, and they know it. But it benefits Obama to suggest that the Clintons are racists. It’s also incredibly destructive to the Democratic Party, and I can’t think of a single thing the Clinton campaign has done that equals it in offensiveness. It also helps to inoculate the Republicans from being called on their real racism. The fact that I’m pissed off at Clinton for other things does not blind me to the fact that there’s plenty to be pissed off at Obama about. It sure is working for him, though, isn’t it?

Update: See also this Mickey Kaus article, Psst!–Ferraro was right in Slate. Kaus points out that somehow it was okay for the color of Obama’s skin to be part of his appeal when Andrew Sullivan mentions it in The Atlantic.

Hello! Mrs. Ferraro? If one of the “formeost” things Obama offers voters is the “face of a brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia, etc.” doesn’t that mean “he would not be in this position if he were white”? If you like Obama because he might “rebrand” America to the world–well, he wouldn’t accomplish that simply by having his election televised, as Sullivan suggests he would, if he were white, would he? Or think in purely domestic terms. If Obama were white, he wouldn’t embody hopes of a post-racial future. Duh! That’s part of his appeal. It seems obvious. Why does Obama dispute it? Why isn’t Ferraro allowed to acknowledge it? Is it OK for Obama’s “face” to appeal to egghead Atlantic subscribers but not ordinary Wyoming caucusers? Or was Sullivan being “offensive”" and “ridiculous” too?

I also think it’s pretty clear that Sullivan-style logic is at the core what Ms. Ferraro meant when she said “[he] happens to be very lucky to be who he is” and that “the country is caught up in the concept” of his presidency. She’s not arguing that he’s where he is because black voters are caught up in identity politics–more the opposite, that white and black voters alike are caught up in the idea of ending identity politics. Nor does she does she seem to be arguing it’s wrong to be at least temporarily “caught up” in this concept. But the concept wouldn’t be there if Obama was white.

Updated again: Daily Howler

And by the way, just so we all understand, this is part of what Geraldine Ferraro was talking about in Jim Farber’s Daily Breeze profile. You know? In the parts of Farber’s profile which everyone knew to ignore? Why was Ferraro feeling “emotional” about the current campaign? She explained: “For one thing, you have the press, which has been uniquely hard on her. It’s been a very sexist media.”

Other statements by Ferraro were, at least, clumsily worded. By contrast, these statements were perfectly accurate—and by some peculiar act of agreement, they were completely ignored.

For ourselves, we wouldn’t say that any of this was necessarily worth discussing; Ferraro was a minor player speaking to a very minor newspaper. But like that Ingrid Bergman character [in Notorious], we can sometimes read a tell [see full post for explanation] —and yesterday, the tell was quite obvious. It’s not unlike what Ferraro may have been saying: Our pundit culture is very careful about issues of race (good). But then, it seems to feel quite free to gender-trash certain women. Indeed, watchdogs don’t even seem to see such conduct when it occurs.

Many boys in the pseudo-liberal world tolerated this for more than a year. This week, these fellows have been crying real tears about Ferraro’s poorly-worded statements. They also knew which of her statements to skip right past as they composed their high-minded briefs. Fellows like this have always been with us. On Thursday, they gave us a tell.

H/T Avedon Carol on this one (as on so many).

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