FERRARO: WORDS AND REALITY

Sam Smith

FROM A POLITICAL standpoint, Geraldine Ferraro's comment that "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," is pretty stupid. In real life, the truth must always be spoken, but the truth need not always be told. In politics, neither are necessary and both are sometimes fatal.

The fact is that few politicians could have pulled off Obama's stunt, rising from state senate to presidential candidate in less than four years. True, Obama talks good and is, as they say in Maine, a charmah, but his ethnicity also played a big role as did the party bosses desperately looking for a new image for the Democratic Party. It wasn't an accident that he was picked out of 1,971 senatorial peers in state legislatures to give the national convention address in 2004.

To be sure, white guys have benefited from the same sort of thing - as recently as 1988 when an unknown governor from Arkansas was asked to give the convention address. In fact, Bill Clinton's speech didn't go over anywhere near as well as Obama's.

But it was part of a remarkably similar process, that I attempted to describe in my book, Shadows of Hope:

"How one comes to matter in Washington politics is guided by few precise rules, although in comparison to fifty years ago the views of lobbyists and fundraisers are far more significant than the opinion, say, of the mayor of Chicago or the governor of Pennsylvania. This is a big difference; somewhere behind the old bosses in their smoke-filled rooms were live constituents; behind the political cash lords of today there is mostly just more money and the few who control it.

"Thus coming to matter has much less to do with traditional politics, especially local politics, than it once did. Today, other things count: the patronage of those who already matter, a blessing bestowed casually by one right person to another right person over lunch at the Metropolitan Club, a columnist's praise, a well-received speech before a well-placed organization, the assessment of a lobbyist as sure-eyed as a fight manager checking out new fists at the local gym. There are still machines in American politics; they just dress and talk better.

"There is another rule. The public plays no part. The public is the audience; the audience does not write or cast the play. In 1988, the 1992 play was already being cast. Conservative Democrats were holding strategy meetings at the home of party fund-raiser Pamela Harriman. The meetings -- eventually nearly a hundred of them -- were aimed at ending years of populist insurrection within the party. They were regularly moderated by Clark Clifford and Robert Strauss, the Mr. Fixits of the Democratic mainstream. Democratic donors paid $1000 to take part in the sessions and by the time it was all over, Mrs. Harriman had raised about $12 million for her kind of Democrats.

"Clinton may have bored millions of Americans on TV that night, but Clifford, Strauss, Harriman and the DLC found him intensely interesting, extremely intelligent -- an appealing pragmatist, willing to compromise, and fully at home with the policy jargon of the capital."

And so now they have come up with Obama: intensely interesting, extremely intelligent -- an appealing pragmatist, willing to compromise, and fully at home with the policy jargon of the capital. And black.

The assets that any unknown pol brings to the table varies, but this year it clearly includes the color of Obama's skin, just as when Ferraro ran, gender mattered a lot.

So why does Ferraro have a hard time with this?

Because the intricacies of ethnic and gender politics are nowhere near as simple as the media and cultural moralists would have us believe.

Consider the fact that Ferraro is Italian, one the major American ethnic groups - like the Irish and Germans - who found themselves de-ethnicized with the civil rights era and later developments. We could have saved ourselves a lot of misery if we had remembered to respect everyone's culture and past as we were helping those whose culture and past had been repressed. I once suggested to a top executive of NPR that the network could do the nation and civil rights a favor by including more stories about Italians, Germans and the Irish. Part of the problem, after all, is that everybody wants to be in show business. You can't have multiculturalism that works if you leave anyone out. The NPR exec looked at me as if I were nutty.

Here's a bit of Ferraro's story from Wikipedia: "Ferraro was born in Newburgh, New York. Her father, an Italian immigrant, died when she was eight; her mother was a seamstress. Ferraro received her undergraduate degree from Marymount Manhattan College, and a J.D. degree from Fordham University School of Law, going to classes at night while working as a second-grade teacher in public schools during the day. Ferraro graduated from law school in 1960, one of only two women in her graduating class."

She was the Obama of another era, but that era has passed.

In fact, it may have also passed for a lot of older feminists who lined up behind Clinton, and even if you don't care for their crummy choice of icon, you can appreciate the source of some of their bitterness: this young black guy is going to get what we may never get in our lifetimes - one of ours running the place.

But history plays by its own rules. For example, the most striking moment of this campaign for me has been Obama's victory in the Mississippi primary. I remember Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party trying to get seated at the 1964 Democratic convention and I covered the grim Mississippi hearings of the US Commission on Civil Rights in 1965. If Mississippi can elected Barack Obama, there may be something to progress, after all. As S.B. Buck, the black owner of Buck's Restaurant in Greenville, put it, "It's the greatest thing since salt."

Still, that's just one American story. It's not the story of Geraldine Ferraro, the daughter of an Italian immigrant and it's not the story of Geraldine Ferraro, the woman who made it the farthest in national politics but still not to the top.

We forget that others have stories, that pain is distributed as well as virtue, just like hopes and ambitions.

But most of all, we have been taught to forget that it's not a matter of what color or what sex wins the election but who will win or lose as a result. And so nobody seems to notice, what with all the harrumphing over proper language and etiquette, that neither the black nor the woman candidate has offered any significant programs to improve the lives of the less fortunate of their ilk. A white guy named Edwards tried that, but this is a year for symbols, rather than real things, and so he lost.

Of course, it's been coming for a long time. Over the past thirty years, we have been taught to use iconography and nice words over substance in such matters. Check a timeline of either the civil rights or the women's movement and you'll find this confirmed. Here's how I described it once:

As things stand now, America's cultures are standing on their separate turfs hurling symbols at each other. And some have divined in this the message that it is all right to hurl other things as well. Working our way out of this jam will take a willingness to come together, to think of the future more than of the past, to learn how to enjoy our differences, and to speak honestly, without violence, of our fears and, yes, even of our prejudices. It will mean finding ways of revealing the individual under the mask of culture. It will above all take a revival of the often forgotten faith that there is a powerful advantage in doing these things. For without that, everything else we do will be a lie no matter how politely we treat each other.

I once asked the black journalist Chuck Stone to give me a one sentence recipe for improving multicultural relations. His answer: treat everyone as a member of your family. Coming from an often fractious family of six siblings, I knew exactly what he was talking about. And I recalled my father's oft-stated rule: you don't have to like your relatives; you just have to be nice to them.

In fact, both Ferraro and Obama in his reaction are playing a game, trying to score one or two points in a tight race. That's okay, but what we shouldn't forget some of the unintended consequences, such as the effect our obsession with language has on what we say we're trying to achieve.

One of the most common causes of prejudice is the feeling that one - or a group of ones - has been screwed and then looks around for someone to blame. The people at the top know this - whether old time southern white elite or contemporary presidential campaign managers - and they use it, exacerbate it and distort it.

You don't fight it by insisting that everyone use nice language. In fact, mean or harsh words often serve as a useful warning of unattended problems. The best way to fight it is with policies that make life fairer for everyone.

During the long years of southern segregation, the white establishment managed to convince poor whites that it was blacks rather than itself that posed the biggest threat. Only occasionally was the myth challenged, as when Earl Long went after black votes while holding onto his low income white constituency. When Long was elected in 1948 there were only 7,000 black voters in Louisiana. By the time he left office a decade later, there were 110,000.

It was not that Governor Long was any moral model. His language, for example, would have shocked today's white and black liberals. What he did do, and quite well, was to put together people who many at the top didn't want together. And at a time when the likes of Lyndon Johnson and William Fulbright were carefully avoiding the race issue, Long took on the White Citizens Council.

In fact, the best way to change people's minds about matters such as ethnic relations is to put them in situations that challenge their presumptions. Like joining a multicultural political coalition that works. It's change produced by shared experience rather than moral by revelation.

Martin Luther King understood this as he admonished his aides to include in their dreams the hope that their present opponents would become their future friends. And he realized that rules of correct behavior were insufficient: "Something must happen so as to touch the hearts and souls of men that they will come together, not because the law says it, but because it is natural and right."

Yet when then presidential candidate Howard Dean said he wanted to get the votes of people who drove pickups with confederate flag stickers, he was immediately excoriated by other candidates.

The Dean controversy was driven by several factors. One was the growing liberal preference for proper language and symbolism over proper policy. Thus confederate flags soared above such other possible issues as the drug war with its disastrous effect on young black males, discrimination in housing and public transportation, and the lack of blacks in the U.S. Senate.

Further, while liberals are happy to stigmatize certain stereotypes, they are enthralled with others, such as the self-serving suggestion that they represent a new class of "cultural creatives" saving the American city. And from whom, implicitly, are they saving the American city? From the blacks, latinos and poor forced out to make way for their creativity.

Another factor has far deeper roots: our fear of public discussion of class issues. Although this has repeatedly been noted by both black and white observers, it has little effect on our politics or the media, both of which project the myth that ethnic conflict occurs independent of economic divisions.

One who understood otherwise was the black writer, Jean Toomer - who once described America as "so voluble in acclamation of the democratic ideal, so reticent in applying what it professes."

Writing in 1919, Toomer said, "It is generally established that the causes of race prejudice may primarily be found in the economic structure that compels one worker to compete against another and that furthermore renders it advantageous for the exploiting classes to inculcate, foster, and aggravate that competition."

The flap over Ferraro's words is one more sign that, even 90 years later, we don't really want to talk about the real stuff yet.