March 20, 2008, 3:59 pm
Ferraro Takes Offense at Obama SpeechAmy Chozick reports on the presidential campaign.
Geraldine Ferraro's ouster from Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign hasn't stopped her from continuing to criticize Clinton rival Sen. Barack Obama.
The former vice presidential candidate criticized Obama for his Tuesday speech on race relations in which he compared offensive comments made by his longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to comments she made about him earlier this month.
"To equate what I said with what this racist bigot has said from the pulpit is unbelievable," Ferraro told the Daily Breeze in Torrance, Calif.. "(Obama) gave a very good speech on race relations, but he did not address the fact that this man is up there spewing hatred.""/size]In his widely praised speech, Obama distanced himself from Wright's rhetoric while explaining their close relationship. Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not, he said. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. 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.
Ferraro earlier had told the California newspaper that "If Obama was white, he would not be in this position", a sentiment that set off a firestorm in part because she didn't back away from it and said she was right in a number of TV appearances. At the same time, Wright's fiery sermons were getting media exposure. What (Wright) is doing is spewing that stuff out to young people and to younger people than Obama and putting it in their heads that its OK to say "God damn America" and to beat up on white people, Ferraro told the Daily Breeze. "You don't preach that from the pulpit."
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/03/20/ferraro-takes-offense-at-obama-speech/?mod=googlenews_wsj
