It pains me to write this diary. It pains me that I feel this diary is necessary. But with the way this primary election is going, with charges of racism and race baiting, I feel we all need to understand what's got people riled up, and why.
We need especially to talk about it before it tears the party apart even before we go to the general election.
The latest furor is over Geraldine Ferraro's comments on Barack Obama being lucky, and priveleged in this race. The divide between the Clintons and the African-American community started before this comment, and this is only exacerbating that divide.
When looking at this brouhaha, you have to understand the difficulty Hillary has had in winning against an extremely bright, eloquent orator, one who also was against the war before it started, which is her greatest flaw. She'd have this same problem if he was white, or green with purple polka dots.
In order to combat his oratory, she denigrated him as simply fine rhetoric, with little substance. Her first mistake was to compare him to Martin Luther King, and herself to LBJ. Her comment was, "Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act. It took a president to get it done."
Well, MLK, as fine as he was, wasn't about serving all Americans, he was concerned about race and inequality. This was Clinton's first attempt to paint Obama as a black candidate, one who is concerned about black issues.
That incident was soon followed by Bill Clinton's comparing Obama to Jesse Jackson, another attempt to paint Obama as a black candidate.
With Hillary's losing streak, and her failure to paint herself as CiNC material, and her failure to promote her foreign policy experience, there needed to be a new issue for that kitchen sink.
Enter Geraldine Ferraro and her laughably ignorant statement. When it became public, Susan Rice said:
"That's a really outrageous and offensive comment," Rice said on MSNBC television after Ferraro, who sits on Clinton's finance committee, had said: "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position."
"It is the sort of comment that we have heard repeatedly, I'm afraid, from some of the Clinton surrogates," said Rice, Obama's leading adviser on foreign policy.
She said Ferraro's remarks were "far worse" than those of another foreign policy aide, Samantha Power, who was forced to resign from the Obama campaign last week for calling Clinton a "monster."
"I think if Senator Clinton is serious about putting an end to statements that have racial implications, that diminish Barack Obama because he's an African-American man, then she ought to really repudiate this comment and make it clear that there's no place in her campaign for people who will say this kind of thing," Rice said.
Note: Nowhere did she call Ferraro a racist.
Now, Clinton and her kitchen sink strategy have the meme right where they want it. Obama is now the black candidate, and according to Ferraro, his campaign is playing the race card.
This is what's so un-Democratic about what she's doing. She's using the prime tenets of the party, gender equality and race equality, and setting them against each other.
She's lost on the issues, and this is the only way she can save herself. Start a civil war within the party.