Laura Berman's Blog

  • Blog Tools:
  • Comment
  • Read Comments
  • Text Size:
  • Small Text Size
  • Normal Text Size
  • Large Text Size
Posted by Laura Berman (The Detroit News) on Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 3:49 PM

Did Geraldine Ferraro really say that?

Geraldine Ferraro, once the first woman vice-presidential nominee, is providing grist for the Obama camp, now clamoring for her head. But the comments she made to the Torrance (CA) Daily Breeze are similar, if not identical, to those she made at a Livonia event last Thursday.

The Daily Breeze incited controversy with this Ferraro comment: "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position." But in Livonia, that line was part of a larger riff about her own status as the first female vice-presidential nominee. If she hadn't been a woman, she said, she wouldn't have been nominated.

If you listened to her comments in context, they compared her (failed) candidacy to his (ascendant)one. She said it. She meant it. Her candor, in the heat of a dead-heat campaign, provided the Obama campaign with a rejoinder to last week's Hillary "monster" quote. But it also shows how plucking a single line out of a newspaper is unlikely to explain the rest of the story.

  • Comment  | 
  • Read All Comments  | 
  • Link  | 
  • Save and Share

No comments found.

  • Blog Tools:
  • Comment
  • Read Comments
  • Text Size:
  • Small Text Size
  • Normal Text Size
  • Large Text Size

About this Weblog

Laura Berman is a Detroit News columnist who writes about local, national and, occasionally, personal issues. She's using her blog as a place to react to breaking news, try out new ideas and reinvent old ones and get and give tips about the Detroit area and beyond. Readers are invited - no, begged - to comment, amuse, challenge, ponder and, even, rant.

Laura has been a features writer, columnist, business and political reporter and magazine staff writer at the Detroit Free Press, and a contributor to many national magazines. Her journalism awards include a National Headliner Award for column writing. She has a degree in history from the University of Michigan.

Advertisement