The pro-Obama mainstream media's hypocrisy is alive and well.
"If Obama was 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."Mrs. Ferraro was extending her Gerald / Geraldine analogy, one she had used many times in the past: that if her name had been Gerald instead of Geraldine she would not have been chosen to be Mondale's running mate. Her point was that her legislative record and accomplishments weren't all that different from a lot of her (male) colleagues. But as a woman she embodied a message of change and progress. Mrs. Ferraro's point about Obama was that had he been just another white guy (like Edwards, Biden, Dodd, Gravel, Kucinich, Kerry, Gore and Bradley) he probably would not have stood out so noticeably nor would he have embodied a message of change and progress so dramatically.
What followed was a full bore attack on Ferraro and Clinton. Ferraro's comment was (mis)reported as "Ferraro says Obama lucky to be black" (mysteriously, lots of stories used that headline.... almost as if it had come from a single source. cough cough). She was called a racist by every prObama media stooge and Obamabot out there. Lots of people deliberately misinterpreted her statement.
The New York Times reported it this way:
"The Democratic presidential contest was jolted Tuesday by accusations surrounding race and sex, set off by remarks from Geraldine Ferraro that Barack Obama had received preferential treatment because he is a black man."
Keith Olbermann said this:
"So the senator wants a clearly racist, clearly equal-opportunity-is-not-a-good-thing, that's-the-only-reason-he's-here kind of statement interjected into the campaign?" and "Does it not have disaster written all over it, or are we living in South Africa?"
In the second statement, Keith is accusing Senator Clinton of apartheid-caliber racism for not immediately denouncing Ferraro.
And of course the double standard applied. Clinton was a racist because one of her surrogates made a comment that was twisted into something racist. But is Obama racist because of his association with Reverend Wright? Is he a misogynist like Father Pfleger? I don't recall the liberal blogosphere going there.
To demonstrate just how extreme the double standard is, let's take a look at a recent article from the AP and picked up by Yahoo's news aggregator.
Young voters: Obama's race as an asset, non-issueThis is a pro-Obama article, and the voices the reporter captures are on Obama's side. They are clearly saying that Obama's racial identity is an asset. He embodies change in a way that a white man - say, John Edwards - could not.
By MARTHA IRVINE, AP National Writer Fri Jun 6,
[snip]
Many young voters say a diverse background is an asset for a candidate.
"Rather than just being tolerant of race, we embrace and accept our differences," says Alisha Thomas Morgan, a 29-year-old black state lawmaker in Georgia. "We all recognize that racism still exists. But I think younger people are much more willing to get over it."
They also are more accustomed to seeing people of color in positions of power. The country has, for instance, had a black secretary of state for the past seven-plus years.
"I shouldn't say we're taking it for granted. But it's not especially strange to us," says Tobin Van Ostern, a junior at George Washington University who is spending his summer in Chicago as a leader for Students for Barack Obama.
Van Ostern, who is white, says he understands that Obama's victory is historic. "But it's one that seems appropriate for the direction the country is going," he says. "In numerous ways, it presents a new image of the United States to the world — and not just because of the color of his skin."
Throughout the primary season, Obama supporters endured jabs from pundits and Hillary Rodham Clinton backers who called them "latte drinkers," among other labels. To them, it seemed to suggest elitism and the notion that young adults were taken with the Illinois senator because it was trendy.
Certainly, the chance to vote for a black man is part of the appeal, Morgan says. "It's fine if they vote for him because he's African- American, as long as they don't stop there," she says. "But I would be voting for Obama whether he was white or whatever. The fact that he is African-American is a plus."
The way Patricia Turner sees it, Obama's race is just one factor that makes him more accessible to younger voters. Turner is a professor of African-American studies at the University of California, Davis, a diverse campus where she says no one racial or ethnic group is the majority.
She recalls a conversation at a recent university dinner where her table included a few Asian-American students and a white woman in her 30s who was married to a man of mixed race. Asked what struck them about Obama, they listed everything from his age and rearing by a single mother to the fact that he is biracial.
"There's something about the sophisticated and complex ethnic identity that resonates with younger voters as well," says Turner, who is black. "Younger people are able to say 'we' — and that 'we' includes Barack Obama."
[snip]
[Political science professor Joseph Stewart Jr] has found that many of the youngest voters have little sense of relatively recent incidents of racial strife — for example, the Los Angeles riots that followed the acquittal of the white police officers who beat Rodney King.
"So a lot of the acceptance and the lack of relevance of race is simply a lack of history," Stewart says. "We usually think that's a bad thing — but there may be some positives, too."
How is this any different from what Mrs. Ferraro said?
And why is it that when Mrs. Ferraro said it, she was a race-baiter, but when Obama supporters say it, its a message of progress and hope?
The double standard. Just one of the many reasons I won't vote for Obama.
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