Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Q & A

Geraldine Ferraro asks:

“Why is his candidacy historic? Can you give me another reason why it is an historic campaign?"

Answer: because it is a refreshing and persuasive attempt at politics sans bullshit.

7 comments:

Kris Tiner said...

...which is the one thing I was hoping Olbermann WOULD say tonight.

Andrew Durkin said...

Yeah -- the more I think about this, the more pissed I get. Making it a pointless battle over who is the more "historic" candidate only serves the right-wing talking points about identity politics (making it all seem like a petty squabble between egomaniacs).

Andrew Durkin said...

That should have been "Making it a pointless battle over whether an African-American man or a white woman is the more 'historic' candidate [...]"

It's late!

Anonymous said...

Kevin Drum: "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."

Andrew Durkin said...

"It's way more likely that she just blurted out something dumb to a local reporter"

Sure -- just like Samantha Power.

This is a useful context (and his description of the DB is pretty accurate -- I used to look through it from time to time when I lived in Redondo Beach, and "faceless" is almost charitable). I guess at this point I'm less interested in how the story broke than in how the various interested parties are responding to it.

Anonymous said...

But if those responses don't include a lot of Hillary backers vocally supporting Ferraro's comments (I really have no idea), then that would be one less thing to be pissed about.

Andrew Durkin said...

But if those responses don't include a lot of Hillary backers vocally supporting Ferraro's comments (I really have no idea), then that would be one less thing to be pissed about.

True. Personally, I haven't noticed many HRC supporters coming out and defending Ferraro's statements, and that is to their credit.

But there's a certain ossification going on that I find rather discouraging. That is, while there may not be many on the HRC side who agree with what Ferraro said, the flashpoint, emotional nature of her comments has only caused supporters on both sides to dig in deeper, and to move farther and farther away from letting this be a contest in which "the best idea wins."

End result: an increasingly irrevocable rift in the party. Primary beneficiary: McCain.

We should be well beyond this crap by now.