<p>No wonder she never went further than she did! She was the token female VP candidate in her day. I guess the women at the time felt the same as many would now. She wouldn’t help sway the women vote.</p>
<p>You got one part right simba. She is old. :o</p>
<hr>
<p>Not only was she a woman, but an immigrant from Italy. I guess she had two reasons for her token choice as VP.</p>
<p>"In 1984, Ferraro was picked to run as Vice President of the United States on the Democratic Party ticket, with former Vice President Walter Mondale as the candidate for President. In her acceptance speech, she spoke of the realization of the American dream: “Tonight, the daughter of an immigrant from Italy has been chosen to run for vice president in the new land my father came to love…”</p>
<p>One could speculate that her only qualification at the time was that she was an Italian woman. :eek:</p>
<p>Yep, and that’s why parading the old politicians from an era gone by works so well for Hillary. Showing up flanked by Bill and Madeleine Albright worked wonders in Iowa, didn’t it? And so did insulting the “backwards” voters of Miss and South Carolina! </p>
<p>Out of touch with the reality of 2008 is what comes to mind. Bringing “old gals with guts,” sharp claws and acerbic tongue is really all what is left in the Clinton tank. </p>
<p>Must be hard to have exhausted all positive campaign narrative more than six months before the real debate is to start. The RNC should consider sponsoring the old democrats’ guard and put them on a tour bus. Nothing like the Mondale/Old Gal with “guts” ticket to remind the country of what winners … think. Heck, change that bus for a Dukakis tank in case Iraq comes up!</p>
<p>Speaking of their nominee, McCain has been looking at the softer side of John Hagee’s anti-catholic comments in the past couple of days. In an interview on Bill Bennet’s radio show, McCain said he doesn’t think Hagee is really anti-catholic, and says Hagees comments were taken out of context. </p>
<p>Out of context. Exactly in what context are Hagee’s anti-catholic comments ok, I wonder.<br>
This will get more mainstream press in the general. ( In my dreams) Right now it’s only being played on blogs and utube.</p>
<p>“He started poor and went up through the black community because that’s where the opportunity for him was.”</p>
<p>ASAP, that’s not quite correct. First off, his father left his mother when he was 2 yr old, then his mother married an oil executive who moved them to Indonesia where he went to private school (a few years in a muslim school, a few in a catholic school). When his mother divorced that husband, the two of them moved back to Hawaii (where she’d met his dad at U. Hawaii). At some point the mom wasn’t on the scene, so his maternal grandparents raised him and sent him to a $14k/yr private school in Hawaii where his rep was as the “smart snobby rich kid”. After hs, it was off to Columbia, then Harvard Law.</p>
<p>Not exactly the poor black kid from the ghetto.</p>
<p>ps - in that Daily Breeze article Ferraro admits w/o hesitation that she was the token female candidate. she also notes Obama is pulling in 80% of the black vote in just about every state. i think the dems would like him to get the nomination in part to get black voters they’ve lost to the republicans back in the fold, and also to get young voters energized and into the party. i’ve read there is fear that if he is not the nominee, the young voters and the black voters won’t turn out in november the way they are now.</p>
<p>I guess it’s all relative. He was born to parents without means. His grandparents provided a middle class upbringing, but his life was not stable, and not one of a “rich kid.” I’ve gone to school in Hawaii. Public schooling in most areas of Hawaii at that time were very poor, and most non-natives of Hawaii did go to private schools. I didn’t say he grew up in the streets of Harlem.
A private religious school in Indonesia, yes- and you expect him to go to a public one in a foreign country? Were there really that many choices?
His early political successes were due largely to his black community support and the connections he made while an organizer in the black communities in his home state. </p>
<p>Do you really believe that Obama’s current success is primarily because he is black? I’m amazed. I believe he succeeded in spite of it. How many black senators do we have, again?</p>
<p>In case anyone cares, Obama is currently the only black senator in the U.S.Senate.
There have been 5 total in our history, two in the 1800’s, and two modern senators- Carol Mosely Braun (Illinois also) and Edward Brooke (Mass).</p>
<p>The risk with black voters does not lie in simple ‘who is it’, but the potential of feeling wronged by the old white guys stepping in when ‘their candidate’ has the lead(as he almost certainly will in pledged delegates).</p>
<p>ASAP, I don’t think Obama is where he is because he’s black, not in the sense that anyone is giving him something he doesn’t deserve. He is a very smart and gifted politician. Being good looking and young doesn’t hurt. But what I think Ferraro was referring to is the numbers, ie, getting 80% (in some states 90%) of the black vote and also record numbers of black voters. In a state where the black vote may be as high as 50% of the total, getting 80 to 90% creates a landslide and I doubt there is a white politician alive who could pull that off.</p>
<p>Obama is generating enthusiasm among black voters and young voters of all stripes such as has not been seen in many a year. These are two demographics the democratic party very much wants in their pocket and he’s the candidate to pull it off. If it were just a matter of being black and a good speaker, Jesse Jackson would have been more successful; he wasn’t. Obama is a phenomenon and I freely give him credit as such. They don’t happen often.</p>
<p>ps - I don’t mean ‘phenomenon’ as in any way an insult. Jack Kennedy was a phenomenon, and I was a huge fan, even tho’ I was still in the single digits age-wise.</p>
<p>For me, Obama has always been 90% message, 8% backstory and 2% skin color. Just being honest. I think there were a lot of people who heard him speak during the DNC in 2004 who, at about paragraph #4, could have cared less what color he happened to be. And from there, the message only got better (i.e. more consistent, more impassioned.) And behind the message, a vision. The 2% is just a small bonus. That and Michelle.</p>
<p>Many white voters (young and old) have also been energized by Obama. Mississippi will be all over the news today because of the major “racial divide” there, and the sound bites associated with that.</p>
<p>However, the last two states that Obama won were Wyoming and Vermont. Both states are greater than 95% white! :o</p>
<p>I agree that Obama is a phenomena. I heard that speech at the Dem. Convention and was completely bowled over. I knew we’d be hearing more from that young man.</p>
<p>There were only 8,753 votes cast in the Wyoming Democratic primary, including the undecided votes. Here’s the breakdown by race/party in Mississippi on the CNN website:</p>
<p>te by Party and Race Clinton Obama<br>
White Democrats (25%) 70% 23%<br>
White Independents (12%) 55% 40%<br>
Black Democrats (44%) 9% 91%<br>
Black Independents (4%) N/A N/A<br>
Latino Democrats (0%) N/A N/A<br>
Latino Independents (0%) N/A N/A<br>
All Republicans (13%) 76% 24%<br>
All Other Party (2%) N/A N/A</p>
<p>70% of white democrats voted for Hillary; 91% of black democrats voted for Obama, and they were 44% of the votes.</p>
<p>mercymom,
I guess I am missing your point and all the hype.</p>
<p>Clinton has probably dominated the older white women vote in many states.</p>
<p>So what? A voter is a voter. In the end, it is the total number of votes that count. If a candidate energizes an interest with a particular group and motivates them to actually go vote, isn’t that in the best interest of the party ?</p>
<p>Not just Illinois also. From the same small neighborhood in Chicago also. I don’t think that’s a coincidence – it’s an uphill battle for a black person to reach the Senate, and that one neighborhood has a certain alchemy that makes it possible.</p>
<p>As a white Mississippi female who proudly cast her vote for Obama yesterday (as did the rest of my family, including college-age daughter), I would urge some caution in all the talk of Mississippi’s racial divide and what that vote means for Obama going forward.
Mississippi is clearly a Republican state in presidential politics; yet of 525,000 votes cast in yesterday’s primary, over 400,000 were cast on the Democratic primary. I know of many, many Republicans who heeded the Rush Limbaugh call to vote for Hillary, and I suspect that number is much larger than the 12% exit polling indicated. After all, who would want to admit that they were casting a sham vote; moreover, by voting in the Democratic primary, voters in 2 of the congressional districts were foregoing a chance to vote for open congressional seats, something that doesn’t happen very often in Mississippi.
The vast majority of true Democratic voters in this state that I know, white or black, are solidly behind Obama. Many of these same people attended Clinton events over the weekend, due to the respect they have for the Clinton administration, but they believe Obama to be the best candidate to lead the country forward. Bottom line, I think the headline coming out of Mississippi of a huge racial divide in the Democratic party is not as accurate as many commentators are trying to make it. Sometimes you have to look behind the numbers.</p>