First, it was Peggy Noonan. Now, it’s Geraldine Ferraro. What is it with white women using the race card to demean Barack Obama’s candidacy?
Geraldine Ferraro, the 1984 vice presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket with Walter Mondale — the first and only woman to ever hold a VP bid — said this to a Torrance, Ca., newspaper last week: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman, 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.”
Ferraro’s comments are ridiculous on many levels. But what’s more outrageous is that her statement seems to echo an earlier argument made by a prominent, female pundit on the right.
In a Feb. 29 Wall Street Journal piece entitled “Try a little tenderness”, right-wing columnist Peggy Noonan blasted Obama’s wife Michelle for a gaffe she’d made earlier that week. “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country,” said the senator’s wife, a statement that would draw broad criticism as anti-American.
But Noonan’s column went beyond criticizing Michelle Obama for the ill-advised statement and called into question the privileged background of both Michelle and Barack Obama, their Ivy League educations and so on.
And then the column took an astounding turn, when Noonan suggested that Michelle Obama was somehow especially privileged because she is black, as if being black in this day and age gave her an advantage.
“Intelligent, strong, tall, beautiful, Princeton, Harvard, black at a time when America was trying to make up for its sins and be helpful,” Noonan said, “and from a working-class family with two functioning parents who made sure she got to school.”
Throughout the piece, Noonan painted a picture of two privileged African-Americans who had somehow gotten one up on white society. She wrote as if the Obamas were the first couple vying for the presidency who had come from a privileged Ivy League background, as if that particular resume wasn’t a prerequisite for candidacy in this country.
“A lot of white working-class Americans didn’t come up with those things. Some of them were raised by a TV and a microwave and love our country anyway, every day,” Noonan wrote.
Coming from Peggy Noonan, this wasn’t all that surprising.
But now, a prominent woman on the left is making the same claim. Is this the dawn of a new age in which white people feel the right to play the race card?
