FOX News – Former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro is stepping down from Hillary Clinton’s finance team after remarks she made to a California newspaper suggested Barack Obama is getting favorable treatment in the media because he’s black.
FOX News confirmed Wednesday that Ferraro, who has been a fundraiser for Clinton, is leaving her unpaid post in the campaign after calls from Obama’s team to restore civility by not letting the debate devolve into race-based arguments.
Speaking to reporters in Chicago, Obama said he didn’t think the comments were racist, but he did call them “ridiculous” and “wrong-headed.”
“The notion that it is a great advantage to me to be an African American named Barack Obama and pursue the presidency, I think, is not a view that has been commonly shared by the general public,”Obama said.
Ferraro notified Clinton by letter that she would no longer serve on Clinton’s finance committee as “Honorary New York Leadership Council Chair.” She wrote that the Obama campaign “is attacking me to hurt you.”
Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson said Ferraro made the decision to leave her post.
He said Clinton had already disagreed with and rejected Ferraro’s comments that Obama wouldn’t be where he is in the race if he were white. He said the campaign had not encouraged the remarks, and that Ferraro was not speaking for the campaign.
“Geraldine Ferraro is not an adviser, she’s not staff, and we have made clear that we reject her comments, we disagree with her comments,” Wolfson said. “In the interviews today she was not speaking on behalf of the campaign and I think she was making that clear.”
The controversy began when the national media picked up on comments Ferraro made in an interview last week with the Daily Breeze 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.”
Ferraro was unrepentant about her comments. She said she has a 40-year history of opposing all kinds of discrimination and that she was speaking from a historical context, noting that she would not have been chosen as Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984 if she had been a man.
“I’m sorry I said nothing negative,” she told FOX News on Wednesday. “I care about the black vote in this country. I really don’t think this is right that they should attack me as racist.”
Former Maryland Lieutenant Gov. Michael Steele, who is black, said that Ferraro’s comments are true, and the fact she can’t speak them “goes to the heart and ugliness of racism.” He said Obama’s candidacy is not diminished by her words, but an oversensitivity is harming debate in America.
“It just speaks to the fact that race, no matter how you slice and dice it,” is all too present in people’s minds, he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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