Joe Conason, Salon: Take another look at Geraldine Ferraro's record in Congress

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Geraldine Ferraro still needs to apologize

To fully grasp why her remarks about Obama were so outrageous, take another look at her record in Congress.

By Joe Conason

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2008/03/14/ferraro_clinton/



Former vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro addresses the Women's Summit at Bryant University in North Smithfield, R.I., March 13, 2008.

Ferraro's three terms in Congress produced little in the way of legislation -- again unlike Obama, whose single term in the Senate has seen him mark several milestones, in particular a landmark ethics reform package. That wasn't the kind of thing that Ferraro would have supported back when she was in the House, since she prided herself on cuddling up to the leadership rather than challenging the status quo in any way. She was an ordinary pork-chopper, but her personality and determination won over Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, then the House speaker. It was the late O'Neill, a fine man in many ways, who made the mistake of recommending her to Walter F. Mondale as a vice-presidential prospect in 1984. The worthy but lackluster Democrat from Minnesota was seeking to spice up his candidacy with a different kind of running mate, and considered several potential female and African-American nominees before settling on Ferraro.

The female running mate was a clever gambit that the Democrats executed very poorly. As inspiring as the Ferraro story was when she took the stage at the July 1984 convention in San Francisco, her nomination turned out to be unhelpful to the Democratic ticket, which lost 49 states to the incumbent Republicans, President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush. Circumstances were generally unfavorable to Mondale, whose own inept campaigning made matters still worse, but the initial euphoria over the first woman on a major party ticket evaporated as soon as the press took a closer look at her background.

As Village Voice investigative reporter Wayne Barrett later revealed, the Republican oppo researchers knew much that Mondale evidently didn't about Ferraro and her family's connections with organized crime, dating back at least two generations, and how she had personally profited from those unsavory bonds. (Barrett and William Bastone continued to report on those links for the Voice when Ferraro ran for the Senate in 1992, discovering literally dozens of contributions and deals that involved the worst thugs in New York.)

To Ferraro, reports of her husband's criminal associations proved only the "anti-Italian" bias of the press. Her claims of ignorance about her husband's real estate business -- he rented space in lower Manhattan to a Mob porn operation and a Chinese sweatshop, among many other questionable deals -- were not entirely plausible, since she was an officer of his company and shared office space with him. There were tax problems, too, and despite a spirited performance at a press conference where she evaded as many questions as she answered, her image never quite recovered before Election Day.