Obama Wins Mississippi Primary

Not surprisingly, Senator Barack Obama won the Democratic Primary in Mississippi with over 60% of the votes cast. The contest was racially charged, with some 40% of the voters saying race actually entered into their deliberations. Since black voters make up 70% of the Democratic vote in Mississippi, that factor weighed in his favor. By the same token, however, one of Mrs. Clinton’s surrogates, former Congresswoman and vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro, played the race card unashamedly right before the voting began. The Clinton campaign is now reduced to saying “Keep the White House white.”

Mrs. Ferraro said “If Obama was [sic] a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.” Yeah, black men in America get an easy ride -- not. They can’t even get a cab in New York after dark. The victimhood of white women in their 60s, like Mrs. Ferraro and Mrs. Clinton, pales (forgive the pun) in comparison.

However, Mrs. Ferraro has a history of this kind of bigotry. In 1988, she mocked the Jesse Jackson campaign (which finished second in delegates to eventual White House loser Michael Dukakis), “If Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn’t be in the race.” The truth is if Mr. Obama had lost 12 straight primaries rather than Mrs. Clinton, this contest would have been over a fortnight ago. Mrs. Ferraro herself entered the national spotlight as an affirmative action selection by Walter Mondale to be his second in the 1984 race. They went on to lose 49 states, and even Mrs. Ferraro’s congressional district in Forest Hills, Queens, New York, voted for Ronald Reagan.

Mrs. Ferraro went a step further in her race baiting. She defended her first remark saying, “Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says, ‘Let’s address reality and the problems we're facing in this world,’ you’re accused of being racist, so you have to shut up,” she told the Daily Breeze of Torrance, California. “Racism works in two different directions. I really think they’re attacking me because I’m white. How’s that?” Well, who brought up race in the first place, Mrs. Ferraro? As for addressing reality, Senator Obama has served four terms in the Illinois state house and two years in the US Senate – the very same qualifications that Abraham Lincoln had when he won his first term. Moreover, sexism works two ways as well or Mrs. Clinton’s tears in New Hampshire would have been her Ed Muskie farewell moment.

In fairness to Senator Clinton, she quickly distanced herself from Mrs. Ferraro’s bigoted attack. “It is regrettable that any of our supporters on both sides because we’ve both had that experience, say things that kind of veer off into the personal. We ought to keep this on the issues. There are differences between us. There are differences between our approaches on health care, on energy, on our experience, on our results that we've produced for people. That’s what this campaign should be about.” That would be fine if she herself didn’t say things like Senator Obama is not a Muslim “as far as I know.”

Desperate times, though, bring out the worst in the Clintonistas, and these are truly desperate times for them. Despite winning the Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island primaries last week, they lost Vermont, the Wyoming caucuses, and now Mississippi. The Texas caucus part of that state’s delegate selection process has finally come to an end, and putting all those together using CNN's figures, the Obama camp actually added a single delegate to its lead over Mrs. Clinton's. The Clintonistas' only hope now is to destroy Senator Obama, and the race baiting is going to make up a significant part of the attacks from here on out.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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