Ferraro didn't say Obama is a loser or has no potential or isn't a promising politician.  She said he wouldn't a presidential candidate at age 45 with only 3 years in the Senate if he weren't AA. I believe it's a valid statement that can at least be debated.

What worries me is:  if Obama does become president are we going to have this constant censorship and lack of objectivity like we had the last 8 years with Bush?  And it seems to me that if Obama is as phenomenal as he and his media claim, why can he not be magnanimous as the front-runner and let valid statements that merely express a personal opinion roll off?  Clinton has been expected to let the kitchen sink roll off.

This is what I think:

1. The "mommy party" has penis envy -- they are hoping to get the male voters the male voters they've been hankering after, but who long ago started voting with the Republicans, this time around by showing they're willing to beat up on women, abandon "women's" issues and basically and throw women -- especially those old, uppity ones with "expectations" off, and under, the bus.

2. This gotcha gamesmanship has got to stop. And the youthful "progressive" blogosphere and the media have got to wake up to the harm they are doing.

Why aren't Olberman and Kroft covering the obscene incarceration rates of young black men? Or, the plight young working class men and women trying to put together a secure family life in an economy where nothing is certain except the fact that the average per capita wage is insufficient to raise a family?

This campaign has been a revelation about the "progressive" community. A very disheartening and disillusioning one -- and that is what is going to inevitably tear the party apart.

3. What has been the liberal, and the Democratic Party's, message to women for the last 30-40 years?

"Stick with us (open your wallets and make sure you vote) because our presidential candidates have attractive, "liberated" wives, and, most important, we're the party that will make sure you can abort your babies."

Beyond that, every Democratic appeal to women -- on the issues that could help make a different "choice" possible for many -- universal, affordable health care, access to child care and early childhood education, family leave, pay equity, more flexible approaches to work and retirement, etc. -- has been made with a wink, a nod and fingers crossed behind their backs.

What we've learned in this campaign is that for affluent liberals, male and female, for whom abortion is a "personal choice" rather than an economic issue, it is the only "feminist" or "woman's" issue they're willing to stand up for. And we've learned that the party's elite leadership and the "progressive" punditocracy that supports it, for the mostly have extreme contempt for all those "older women" who have expected more from the party, and from the many progressive institutions, organizations and media outlets they've supported with their time, energy, money and patronage. Worse, we've learned that the party's leadership and those elites have nothing but disdain for all those younger, poorer women, and their families, whose votes they need and seek -- voters who they refer to dismissively as "women with needs."

It doesn't matter who ends up with the nomination. This campaign may be putting an end to any distinctive rationale for the Democratic Party. It has exposed the Party's gender and class hypocrisy and fault lines, and made apparent the extreme diversion of interests between the male and elite female party leadership and the middle and working class women whose votes have kept the party viable over the last 30 years.

Thanks to Jeralyn for consistently keeping this in the news.

Story here

for now I just want to make one comment: the current attempts to tar Hillary as a racist have gone way, way over the top. They're revolting. Back before the South Carolina primary, the Clinton campaign and its surrogates really did seem to be making a few too many racially charged comments for it to be just a coincidence (though even then some of the accusations were bogus), but after South Carolina it pretty much stopped. I can't say whether it stopped for reasons of politics or reasons of principle, but it stopped.

But the accusations of racism haven't. They've just gotten more ridiculous. Last week a commenter at Daily Kos claimed that the Clinton campaign had concocted an ad that deliberately darkened Obama's face (to make him scarier) and changed the image's aspect ratio (to make his nose broader). They hadn't. After a 60 Minutes appearance, Hillary got slammed for supposedly implying the Obama might be a Muslim. As Eric Boehlert points out, this is patently absurd. Then, a couple of days ago, a legion of bloggers started locking onto the inane meme that talk of Obama as Hillary's VP was like asking him to "ride in the back of the bus." Finally, today, Orlando Patterson, in an apparent attempt to make parody obsolete, writes that when he saw Hillary's "3 am" ad, "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." Hell, even I fell for the racism meme a couple of weeks ago, getting suckered into passing along a Drudge slander about Hillary's campaign supposedly circulating a photo of Obama in "Muslim" garb.