Ferraro Comments Major Issue

From the New York Times

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and JULIE BOSMAN

PHILADELPHIA — The Democratic presidential contest was jolted Tuesday by accusations surrounding race and sex, set off by remarks from Geraldine A. Ferraro that Senator Barack Obama had received preferential treatment because he is a black man.

Ms. Ferraro, the former congresswoman and vice-presidential candidate who backs Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, told The Daily Breeze, a newspaper in Torrance, Calif.: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, 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.”

She made the comments last week, but on Tuesday, the Obama camp latched on to them, calling them outrageous and demanding that Mrs. Clinton repudiate them.

In an interview on Tuesday night, Ms. Ferraro defended her comments and said she was furious with the Obama campaign, accusing it of twisting her words.

“Every time that campaign is upset about something, they call it racist,” she said. “I will not be discriminated against because I’m white. If they think they’re going to shut up Geraldine Ferraro with that kind of stuff, they don’t know me.”

Despite calls that Ms. Ferraro step down from the Clinton campaign, where she is a member of the finance committee, there was no indication on Tuesday that she would.

The Ferraro comments overshadowed an increasingly bitter dispute between the campaigns about the candidates’ qualifications to serve as commander in chief. On Tuesday, Greg Craig, a former official in the administration of President Bill Clinton, and now a vocal supporter of Mr. Obama, issued a blistering rebuttal to Mrs. Clinton’s assertions that she had been deeply involved in her husband’s foreign policy successes.

“She never managed a foreign policy crisis, and there is no evidence to suggest that she participated in the decision-making that occurred in connection with any such crisis,” Mr. Craig said. Referring to her “red phone” commercial, he said, “As far as the record shows, Senator Clinton never answered the phone either to make a decision on any pressing national security issue — not at 3 a.m. or at any other time of day.”

The Clinton campaign said that Mr. Craig’s memorandum was baseless and that the Obama campaign had been unable to make a positive case for Mr. Obama’s experience.

Mr. Obama and the Clintons campaigned Tuesday in Pennsylvania, opening up a new front in the long-running and increasingly bitter contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. The state does not vote until April 22, and there are no contests before then, leaving the candidates six full weeks to try to make news here while their surrogates proceed to eviscerate the opposition.

Mrs. Clinton, of New York, delivered an intensely populist speech here and at a rally earlier in Harrisburg, blasting the oil companies and promising to create jobs and make college affordable. She also reprised her past complaints that Mr. Obama, of Illinois, did not always say what he meant. She said that while he had suggested that, as president, he would renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and withdraw troops from Iraq in 16 months, for example, his top advisers had indicated otherwise.

Mr. Obama, in his first campaign visit to Pennsylvania, did not hold one of his usual big rallies. Instead, he appeared before a few dozen people at a factory in Bucks County that makes wind turbines, reprising glimpses of his plan to expand health care, create more environmentally friendly jobs and provide tax breaks to working families.

But Ms. Ferraro’s comments dominated the day. Reached at her home in Manhattan on Tuesday evening, she said that, in her original remarks, she was asked why there had been so much excitement about Mr. Obama’s candidacy. “And I said, ‘I think part of it is because he’s black,’ ” she said. “People are excited about this historic candidacy. I am, too.”

But the Obama campaign “twisted” her remarks, she said. “I am livid at this thing,” she said. “Any time you say anything to anybody about the Obama campaign, it immediately becomes a racist attack.”

The Clinton campaign did not contact her on Tuesday, Ms. Ferraro said. “I don’t want them to reach out to me,” she said. “I’m exercising my First Amendment rights. If they don’t like it, tough. I don’t intend ever to have anybody tell me that I can’t say what I want to say.”

Ms. Ferraro said her involvement with the Clinton campaign had been vastly overstated. When asked what her role is, she said: “None. None.”

Last fall, Ms. Ferraro also indicated that she thought Mr. Obama was getting preferential treatment from the press. “It’s O.K. in this country to be sexist,” she said then. “’It’s certainly not O.K. to be racist. I think if Barack Obama had been attacked for two hours — well, I don’t think Barack Obama would have been attacked for two hours,” she said, referring to a Democratic debate.

As the day went along, the Obama campaign grew increasingly angry over the remarks, and in the late afternoon, Mr. Obama himself called them “divisive” and “patently absurd.”

Mrs. Clinton later distanced herself from Ms. Ferraro’s comments, telling The Associated Press that she did not agree with what Ms. Ferraro had said.

“It is regrettable that any of our supporters, on both sides, because we’ve both had that experience, say things that kind of veer off into the personal,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Katharine Q. Seelye reported from Philadelphia, and Julie Bosman from New York. Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Fairless Hills, Pa.