...Ms. Geraldine Ferraro, for her response to the backlash about her comments that Barack Obama owes his success to his being black. Ms. Ferraro, who apparently has a history of saying stupid things about presidential candidates, said on "The Early Show" (CBS vintage) that "it wasn't a racist comment, it was a statement of fact."
If you read the article linked above, you will see that this woman has too much of a history of saying this sort of stuff for her response to have been anything other than dead serious. Leaving aside the logical Mobius strip that Ms. Ferraro must have been traveling down in order to believe that the statement-of-fact comment was a good thing to say, this sort of thing worries me. As I blogged about previously, it is a known psychological phenomenon that the mere mention of an idea, no matter how outlandish it is, will convince at least a few people that it is true. So while the vast majority of people have reacted to Ms. Ferraro's rantings with the contempt that she deserves, there will be at least a few voters who will believe her. And in a race as close as this one, that is a problem.
But what bothers me most about this whole thing is the lack of outrage from the Clinton campaign. The only thing that we've heard on the matter from a Clinton spokesman (one not named Mark Penn!) is that they "do not agree with" what Ferraro had to say. Notice that they didn't say anything about how disgustingly wrong-headed the comments were, or about how such words are a clear violation of the style of campaign that Hillary initially promised to run - that is, one free of attack ads and other staples of negative campaigning. They're desperate for anything they can get now, particularly after watching the minuscule gains they made on March 4th evaporate, and then some, with the results from Wyoming and Mississippi. But have they really fallen far enough that Ms. Ferraro is no longer worthy of their contempt?
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