After stirring up a controversy with her declaration that Barack Obama wouldn’t be leading the Democratic race if he weren’t a black man, Geraldine Ferraro now claims people are attacking her because she is white. (She later apologized on “Good Morning America” if “people think this was a racist comment”)
I am not the first to note the irony of all of this, given that the only reason Ferraro was on Walter Mondale’s 1984 ticket was that she is a woman. But I did go back and re-read the part of Jack Farrell’s brilliant biography of Tip O’Neill, which explains how the selection of this little-known congresswoman from New York came about (this from pages 644-645 of the hardcover edition):
She was the Speaker’s kind of gal, much to the dismay of more senior Democratic congresswomen like Lindy Boggs and Pat Schroeder. “I don’t think he understood me, and I clearly didn’t understand him,” said Schroeder, who was once asked by O’Neill why she, and not her husband, had run for Congress. The Speaker was “appalled” when Schroeder brought her small children to the floor. “It was the planet of the guys around here,” she said.
Ferraro, on the other hand, wasn’t “a threat,” said Tony Coelho. “She is not a feminist with wounds.”…
In early May 1984, when talk of a Mondale-Hart ticket began to circulate, O’Neill made a preemptive strike. “I have a candidate. Her name is Geraldine Ferraro. She’s from New York. She’s a Catholic. She’s been an effective member and she’s very smart,” he announced. …
“Tip very clearly saw the need for a little bit of pizzazz. He also recognized it was time,” said Ferraro.
This hardly sounds like a decision made on merit–and, more importantly, on a judgment of who might be the best commander-in-chief, should tragedy strike.