Auto-Immune Diversity Syndrome

THE Democrats’ historic, barrier-breaking election, long sought after and long hoped for, is not working out quite as planned. Surely no one imagined that the first female major-party candidate for vice president (Geraldine Ferraro), speaking in the interest of the first woman with a credible chance to be president (Hillary Clinton), would attack the first potential black president (Barack Obama) as an affirmative-action hire who has been unfairly privileged. Meanwhile, it turned out that the black candidate, the agent of healing who would move us all beyond race, had somehow slept through 20 years of anti-white, anti-American sermons by his good friend and mentor, the pastor of his Chicago church.

Ferraro was dumped from her (non-paying) job with the Clinton campaign after Obama’s backers called her a racist, but the story did not end there. Trying to exercise damage control after Reverend Wright’s rants had ignited a furor, Obama posited an equivalence between Ferraro and the renegade pastor: “We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro in the aftermath of her recent statements as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.” Shortly after that speech, Obama linked Wright to his own grandmother, a “typical white person” who, like Jesse Jackson, was sometimes frightened when she saw young black men in the street. Ferraro defended herself and Obama’s grandmother in an impassioned address: “To equate what I said with what this racist bigot has said from the pulpit is unbelievable. . . . He is spewing that stuff out to young people . . . and putting it in their heads that it’s okay to say ‘God damn America,’and that it’s okay to beat up on white people.”

About the Author

Noemie Emery

Noemie Emery has also written for the Washington Examiner and The Weekly Standard.

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Presidential Election

Martin Luther King Jr

THE Democrats’ historic, barrier-breaking election, long sought after and long hoped for, is not working out quite as planned. Surely no one imagined that the first female major-party candidate for vice president (Geraldine Ferraro), speaking in the interest of the first woman with a credible chance to be president (Hillary Clinton), would attack the first potential black president (Barack Obama) as an affirmative-action hire who has been unfairly privileged. Meanwhile, it turned out that the black candidate, the agent of healing who would move us all beyond race, had somehow slept through 20 years of anti-white, anti-American sermons by his good friend and mentor, the pastor of his Chicago church.

Ferraro was dumped from her (non-paying) job with the Clinton campaign after Obama’s backers called her a racist, but the story did not end there. Trying to exercise damage control after Reverend Wright’s rants had ignited a furor, Obama posited an equivalence between Ferraro and the renegade pastor: “We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro in the aftermath of her recent statements as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.” Shortly after that speech, Obama linked Wright to his own grandmother, a “typical white person” who, like Jesse Jackson, was sometimes frightened when she saw young black men in the street. Ferraro defended herself and Obama’s grandmother in an impassioned address: “To equate what I said with what this racist bigot has said from the pulpit is unbelievable. . . . He is spewing that stuff out to young people . . . and putting it in their heads that it’s okay to say ‘God damn America,’and that it’s okay to beat up on white people.”