Ferraro Go Home!

The New York Times was clearly desperate for an outside contribution for its editorial pages today. Not only did they give a huge amount of ink to Geraldine Ferraro to write an editorial on behalf of the Clinton campaign, but in doing so they also managed to inadvertently show just what is wrong with the whole team Clinton.

Ferraro's piece is the campaign's justification for why the super delegates should go against the will of the people in the primaries and how the super delegates are all knowing beings who have saved the Democratic party from itself. Ferraro roots her argument in the 1980 DNC claiming that Kennedy's attempt to wrestle the nomination from a sinking sitting Jimmy Carter was destructive to the party and led to the Hunt Commission on which she served. She goes on to explain that the feeling was that the party leaders felt the only way to insure that all of the party leaders would lock into line at the convention was if they all got more responsibility and power at the convention. The former VP nominee goes on to say that she feels that the 1984 convention which produced the longest platform in history was a tremendous success because it incorporated everyone and had nothing to do with why the party got trounced in the fall.

Where to start here...The 1980 convention was in chaos because though I love Jimmy his administration was in a similar state. While I don't necessarily like the idea of a free for all I can say that I watched in 1980 and the people who jumped ship did so because they saw that Carter was going to be in real trouble in the fall. The 1984 platform was more like Frank Costanza's list of grievances on Festivus and set the standard from its successors, which not so coincidentally enough is why people ignore the platform and write them off as jokes.

The most troubling issue though is her complete disregard for the entire primary process. She states that these involve so few people that those that do show up should be discounted to account for those who don't. Ferraro's argument that Florida and Michigan should count runs counter to her argument, especially since she turns around and says they should not be penalized for the bad judgments of the state party leaders (who are super delegates in most cases) that resulted in the primaries moving up in the first place.