Another day, another Clinton-Obama race row.
The Geraldine Ferraro fracas follows high profile accusations from a Harvard professor that Hillary Clinton's red phone ad was racist:
"I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat."
It's easy to scoff at this sort of thing, but consider the context: The only way that Barack Obama can be denied the Democratic nomination is if the party establishment vetoes his clear lead in the delegate count and/or bends the rules in Clinton's favour – for instance by bending over backwards to undo the disqualification of the Florida and Michigan delegates.
Why would the Democrat bigwigs want to do such a thing? Simple: Hillary may yet be their best chance of beating John McCain. She turns out the vote in crucial swing states like Ohio and Florida, while Obama's lead is based on his strong performance in Republican states that are likely to stay that way come November.
But whatever the excuse, there can be no denying the sense of injustice that Obama supporters will feel if their man is somehow denied the nomination. If the Clintons can't win this fair and square they had better consider the consequences of winning by other means.
