Geraldine Ferraro (1935-2011)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Geraldine Ferraro, the U.S. representative from New York's 9th District from 1979-85 and the first woman to to run on a major party presidential ticket, losing with Walter Mondale to Reagan and Bush in 1984, has died at the age of 75:

Geraldine A. Ferraro, the former Queens congresswoman who strode onto a podium in 1984 to accept the Democratic nomination for vice president and to take her place in American history as the first woman nominated for national office by a major party, died Saturday in Boston.

She was 75 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was complications from multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that she had battled for 12 years, her family said in a statement. She died at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she had been undergoing treatment since Monday.

"If we can do this, we can do anything," Ms. Ferraro declared on a July evening to a cheering Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. And for a moment, for the Democratic Party and for an untold number of American women, anything seemed possible: a woman occupying the second-highest office in the land, a derailing of the Republican juggernaut led by President Ronald Reagan, a President Walter F. Mondale.

I don't wish to speak ill of her, but I never much cared for her. She was never all that liberal and in fact called herself a conservative (and, at least early on, "a tough Democrat," that is a right-leaning Democrat who leaned Republican at least in terms of temperament). And she was simply appalling in her support for Hillary (and in her various attacks on Obama) during the '08 Democratic primaries, proving to be something of a racist, and ending up just embarrassing herself and being dumped from the campaign.

Still, she was a remarkable woman in many ways, and what she did was undeniably remarkable, too. It wasn't easy to be a prominent woman politician at that time, just as it still isn't, but she broke new ground by running on the national stage and, even before that, was a powerful voice on issues such as gender equity, the plight of seniors, and the environment. She was certainly conservative on a number of other issues, and her record was pretty much the record of an ideologically-fluctuating moderate from a fairly socially conservative district, but, whatever her flaws, she was one of the most significant political figures of her time.

Gerry bashes Caroline

By Creature

Now that Geraldine Ferraro has come out against the appointment of Caroline Kennedy to NY's junior senate seat I am doing a compete about face and will now wholeheartedly support Kennedy's bid. If her appointment pisses Ferraro off, then I'm in. Yes, I'm shallow like that.

(Cross-posted at State of the Day.)

Ferraro finally quits

By Edward Copeland

Days after continuing to defend and escalate her insane comments about Barack Obama getting all the breaks because we know how easy it is for African-American men in the United States, former Democratic vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro finally has resigned her post on the finance committee for Hillary's campaign.

Ferraro's statement reads:

"I am stepping down from your finance committee so I can speak for myself and you can continue to speak for yourself about what is at stake in this campaign," Ferraro wrote in a letter to Clinton. "The Obama campaign is attacking me to hurt you. I won't let that happen."

What's really crazy, as are most things in the upside-down black-is-white, day-is-night world of the Clinton campaign is not only that it took so long for Ferraro to get the boot, but the reluctance of Hillary's campaign to even think it was anything except an "unfortunate" comment after they forced out Obama adviser Samantha Power for daring to correctly identify Hillary as a monster, weeks after they whined to MSNBC about a comment by David Shuster resulted in a two-week suspension of Shuster.

The real head-scratcher came from Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams, who had the gall to accuse the Obama campaign's reaction to Ferraro remarks as "playing the race card" and a calculated attack on Hillary.

I never thought I'd find political partisans crazier than the Bush true-believers, but Hillary's hard-liners are getting close to that mark as they repeatedly denounce anything perceived as an attack on them, even if it is a reaction to attacks FROM them. As with everything in this campaign, the Clintonistas believe there are different rules for them and for everyone else.

By the way, tune in to Keith Olbermann tonight: He's finally had it as well and will deliver a Special Comment about the way Hillary Clinton's campaign behaves. You go, Keith.

In a related note from last night's Mississippi primary results, exit polls show that Republicans did follow Rush Limbaugh's advice and vote in the Democratic race to help Hillary. 24 percent of her voters were Republicans, nearly 1 in 4 of every vote cast for her.