Pat Dollard

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The Swamp:

by Mark Silva

Amidst all the controversy surrounding New York’s Democratic governor and the spat between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton over qualifications for the presidency – and even the vice presidency – the words of one erstwhile candidate for vice president may have been overlooked in recent days.

Democrat Geraldine Ferraro, who became the first woman to run as a major party’s candidate when she ran for vice president with Walter Mondale in 1984, believes that Clinton is not getting a fair shake in the media trial that is a modern-day presidential campaign. It has to do with gender, she believes.

And Obama, Ferraro told a newspaper in California recently, would not be in the position he is in today if he were “a white man’’ or a woman of any color.

“I think what America feels about a woman becoming president takes a very secondary place to Obama’s campaign – to a kind of campaign that it would be hard for anyone to run against,” Ferraro said in an interview with the Daily Breeze of Torrance, Cal., in a column published Friday in advance of a speech in the area. “For one thing, you have the press, which has been uniquely hard on her. It’s been a very sexist media. Some just don’t like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign.

“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” Ferraro told the newspaper. “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.”

This isn’t the only venue in which Ferraro has vented about coverage of the Clinton campaign.

Appearing at a recent conference at Michigan State University, she said that she had had a chance encounter with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on a train and had spoken her mind: “I was livid at how he was treating her,” said Ferraro, a staunch Clinton backer and fundraiser for the candidate.

“I have been so distressed by the press,” she said, explaining that she had asked about the way NBC’s Meet The Press moderator Tim Russert had approached Clinton in the last debate. “I said to Chris, ‘Tell me why Tim is doing this.”

Ferraro says the party’s contest has turned because of rising questions about whether Obama has the substance to win. “”People in this state are not going to get jobs because of hope, inspiration and change,’’ Ferraro said at Michigan State. “You have got to go in there and work.”

The Detroit Free Press’ Carol Cain wrote over the weeekend that Ferraro “still gets goose bumps as she recounts stepping into the voting booth to pull the lever for Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale — and herself as his running mate. She made history in 1984 as the first female vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket.