If I have one quibble, and I do, it's the fact that her endorsement only came after the evening news on a Friday. Anything dropped Friday afternoon falls into a great big black news hole and Ferraro knows this. So, it's like she wants people to know that she's not an embittered P.U.M.A. and she's still a Democrat and whatever, but she's not really, really ready to stand on a stage with Barack Obama and repudiate her earlier remarks about him.

But, onto the (half-hearted) endorsement itself. She's going to vote for him, but she's apparently annoyed that she's never met him — which, um, I think is probably understandable given what she said about him earlier this year. And she still thinks his campaign was sexist toward Hillary Clinton, most likely because of his supporters' actions which is not the same, but if she can let that go I'm going to try to.

And although she still thinks that womanity wins when a woman runs, she is even less impressed by Sarah Palin than she was before:

Katie Couric was one of the few women journalists who said the way Hillary Clinton was treated was really very sexist. And she was very, very good in her interview with Palin. She was very on target. She didn't kill her with hard questions. And when you're asked a question like "What do you read?" God, you should be able to answer that one, you know?

Oh, believe us, we know.

So there it is. Obama might not have won Ferraro over — though she thinks Biden was a smart pick — but McCain-Palin have definitely lost her. Now maybe if we can just convince her that "racial resentment" is racism and not something she should be excusing or accepting, I can go back to admiring her for her accomplishments and the cracks that she put in that glass ceiling in 1984.

Gerry! [Politico]
Geraldine Ferraro Speaks Out [PBS]

Related: Clinton disagrees with Ferraro on Obama [Boston Globe]
Gender Issue Lives On as Clinton’s Bid Wanes [NY Times]
Healing The Wounds Of Democrats' Sexism [Boston Globe]

Earlier: Dear Gerry: You Gotta Think About What You're Trying To Do To Me
Ferraro On Palin: She's Not Voting For Her, She Swears

Because she says, "Anytime a woman runs, women win," which I completely disagree with, but at least she follows it up with "That doesn't mean I'm going to vote for her, but I do think that a woman running gives little girls the opportunity to say, 'Wow, I can do this,'" which I guess means that she's at least not pulling a Lady Forester de Rothschild and, well, basically my expectations are so low at this point that I'll take anything that isn't an out-and-out endorsement of Palin from a second-waver who thinks it's important to get a woman in office even if its at the expense of women's issues.

She then answers questions about the disapproval Palin has faced because of her family:

"Comments about the way that Governor Palin organizes her family are ridiculous. We'd never ask Senator Obama how he organizes his family, because we assume that his wife is taking care of it. How many of us have been working mothers all of our lives? Millions of us! When [Congresswoman] Pat Schroeder was asked by one of the more senior members of Congress how she could be a mother and run for office, she said, 'Because I have a brain and a uterus, and I use both.' I always loved that."

Okay, well, first off, I second the Pat Schroeder love. I can't say I'm as much of a fan of the concept that women are in charge of "organizing" families — be it Michelle Obama or Palin — but, as everyone already knows, I do think the criticisms of Sarah Palin's family have gone overboard on occasion. So, while I'll point out that the same sexism that Ferraro decried mere months ago when applied to Hillary she holds up as a stereotype about the Obamas and the Palins without refutation, it's not clear whether she subscribes to the stereotype or not. Once again, lowered expectations people — after last time, it's really just about trying for a little redemption here.

The one thing I do have to take some major issue with is this statement of Ferraro's: "She wouldn't be in the position she's in if she wasn't able to deal with the campaign." Because, really, I think that's pretty debatable. I think she shouldn't be in this position if she's not up for it — and I think Geraldine Ferraro was in 1984 — but either Palin isn't or the McCain campaign doesn't think she is. Either one should give us all pause, Ferraro included. Just being nominated for something doesn't make you ready for it. Palin's gotta prove it, and she definitely hasn't yet.

My Advice For Sarah Palin [Glamour]

Within 24 hours, I snapped and replied to some unwitting e-mailer that I found the comments disgusting and that what we really needed to think about was who we were trying to convince — and what we were trying to convince those people of. Well, if the polls that show women flocking to the McCain ticket and the response she's engendering from conservatives is any sign, we've convinced some people of one thing — that many feminists are feminist only to other feminists.

Now, naturally, few of these conservatives are exactly noted feminists themselves, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist (or a Wasilla mayor) to smell an opportunity to marginalize feminists or point out hypocrisies obvious enough to drive a wedge between liberal feminists and the very women that many of us have been trying to convince to vote for Barack Obama. Take Michelle Malkin, for example — hardly the kind of opinionated conservabloggier that I tend to agree with. Last week, she pointed out the opprobrium that rained down upon Sarah Palin's head for working late into her pregnancy, returning to work early and staying in a demanding job while parenting a special-needs child. She also pointed out that plenty of it came from female journalists who themselves have children and extremely demanding careers. Of course, she called them hacks and water-carriers for Obama, but that's Malkin for you — and it doesn't make her point less valid or accessible to the women that Obama needs on his side.

Then there's noted feminist scholar Jonah Goldberg, who manages to decry sexism and feminist hypocrisy even as he compares feminists to "stuck pigs" and says that one might resemble "a childless feminist who looks like a Bulgarian weightlifter in drag." But, he also hits up Gloria Steinem's OpEd, Cintra Wilson's screed and professor/columnist Wendy Doniger's truly offensive statement that Palin's "greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman." Because, really, there's no better way to win over independent women voters than to question their gender because of their political or religious beliefs. Women on the left should not be denying one another's womanhood because of disagreements about abortion and religion anymore than we should be allowing men like Rush Limbaugh to decide who is or is not a feminist. The problem with Goldberg's piece is not his glaringly offensive stereotypes and generalizations about feminists, it's that he can say all kinds of offensive things about mannish, childless women and it's still only barely as shocking as a feminist saying a person cannot be a Republican and a woman at the same time. And the latter bit is the only thing that's going to get a lot of traction in Central Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado and Michigan among the women that have swung every election for the last two decades.

Libertarian Cathy Young (who really could never annoy me as much as Goldberg or Malkin) writes a far more reasoned and compelling piece today in the Wall Street Journal asking why feminists hate Sarah Palin seemingly beyond reason. She hits some of the same shock quotes as Goldberg before her (and me before him, actually) and says that, from her perspective, Palin's "pro-life feminism [and] small-government, individualist feminism" is more attractive than a kind of feminism that requires government intervention to achieve equality. That's the kind of argument that will play well with independent women voter. It also makes its point about the feminist "hatred" of Palin without reverting to stereotypes about looks and doesn't dismiss the notion that choice is a concern for American women. This is far, far more convincing to the people that need to be convinced — you know, those 30-40 percent of voters in the middle — than arguing that Sarah Palin isn't "really" a woman.

Finally, even Elle's political blogger, Lucy Morrow Caldwell, gets in on the action, chastising South Carolina Democratic Party chairwoman Carol Fowler for saying that Palin's "primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion" (even as she mucks up Fowler's position in the party). Caldwell also says that no one ever suggested about Obama that "his race was the only reason he'd become a candidate in the first place," a statement that is not entirely true, as Geraldine Ferraro no doubt remembers. But few people are going to take the time to point out these inaccuracies in the politics blog of a fashion magazine, and the issue of feminists "bashing" Palin for gendered reasons allows Caldwell to gloss over the part where she herself would be "more cautious [than Palin] on certain foreign policy fronts" in favor of hitting up the mean, mean feminists.

It's not like I don't understand where the anger is coming from. I have heard often enough from liberal women that they don't understand how women can even be Republican...without, of course, ever actually asking one and listening to the answer. I also understand that, in the absence of comprehensive public record of Palin's stances on issues like pay equity or government-funded childcare, it's easy enough to attribute McCain's (bad) stances on those issues to her, especially since, as his running mate, they in effect are her new stances on those issues — and it's easy to conflate hating her positions with hating her as a person. For many women, she seems to be trying to have it both ways, to trumpet her family values and her careerism in a way that Republicans have often bashed other women for doing.

But, most of all, I think the attacks are coming from a place of insecurity that Palin (and all that comes with her) might soften the McCain campaign enough for him to triumph in November. And so if we rail against her, if we play the game of politics by their supposed rules and castigate her for the things conservatives have castigated liberal women for for decades (see: Hillary Clinton) then maybe they won't vote for her and him. The problem is that each party stands by its own hypocrites (see: Congressmen John Mutha and Jim Moran on the left and Senators David Vitter and Larry Craig on the right), so all we're doing by bashing her is inspiring a defense by her ideological compatriots and re-branding feminism as something that defends only liberal women against bias (and that denies a woman's womanliness if she dares to disagree politically, which is straight out of the Republican play book). That's not my feminism and that's not my idea of equality — and, for a lot of moderate women, it's not theirs either.

Polls Show Big Shift To McCain Among White Women [Reuters]
Is Sarah Palin a Feminist? Friday Feminist Fuck NO. [Feministing]
Sisterhood of the Protected Female Liberal Journalists [Michelle Malkin]
Feminist Army Aims Its Canons at Palin [National Review]
All Beliefs Welcome, Unless They are Forced on Others [Newsweek]
Why Feminists Hate Sarah Palin [Wall Street Journal]
Right Angles [Elle]
S.C. Dem Chair: Palin Primary Qualification Is She Hasn't Had An Abortion [Politico]
Ferraro’s Obama Remarks Become Talk of Campaign [NY Times]

Am I supposed to believe that these are Republicans and conservative independents who crossed over to vote for Clinton despite the polls at the time showing that Obama had the lead in self-identified independents? Or am I supposed to believe that they include the likes of Geraldine Ferraro, New York NOW Chapter President Marcia Pappas (she of the "psychological gang bang" statement), Missouri NARAL Chapter President Pamela Sumners and former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who are all quoted within stating their opposition to anyone but Clinton for VP? One would think that if anyone could look gimlet-eyed at the political situation in this country — especially in regards to the candidates and reproductive rights, where Obama and McCain sharply disagree — it would be the likes of women who head state-level reproductive rights organizations, a former Democratic governor nearly excommunicated from his Church over his stance on choice issues or the first female candidate for the Vice Presidency. But is the irrationality of continuing to insist that Hillary Clinton be the Vice President the new rationality for twenty percent of Clinton voters? Is insisting on combating sexism in the media by electing the male Republican candidate the new normative behavior? It begins to get disheartening when the same people who insisted 6 months ago that people, if they looked at the issues, would nominate Clinton would now ignore the issues to express their disappointment that she didn't get the nomination.

And it's even worse to me when you have a potential First Lady — Michelle Obama — who isn't talking about cookie recipes or standing by her man or the other potential First Lady's patriotism, but about juggling work and family and how to have difficult conversations with your children on issues like racism, slavery and sexism. She even talks about those thousands of Hillary Clinton supporters that haven't yet come around in a far more rational and conciliatory way that I've yet been able to manage:

For me, it's not personal. The way I see it? There are a lot of people like me, like how I am about my husband, my candidate. They invested their hearts and souls into Hillary Clinton, and many of them did this for years. They have to figure out how they want to leverage their political power. I understand that. Politics is a patience game. You can't do this unless you have patience.

That's rationality, and attributing to Clinton supporters some sort of minimally-irrational rationality that, in some cases, I'm not sure is actually there.

So, maybe if we're all going to be irrational and ignore the issues we used to pretend mattered to us and vote based on who is taller, or not-too-thin, or more handsome, or didn't beat Hillary Clinton in the primaries or whatever, maybe we can be perfectly irrational and just choose who we'd rather see as First Lady. Michelle's got my vote either way. But it might just be because she always looks so stylish and didn't put a silent "H" in her daughter's name

VP Pick May Chafe Hillary Supporters [Politico]
Obama's Independent Edge [RealClearPolitics]
NOW Head Described Treatment Of Clinton A "Gang Bang" [HuffPo]
Michelle Obama: I'm Still Me [Creators.com]

MEGAN: Hey, how is Austin?
SPENCER: It's filled with liberals, positive reinforcement, beef products, Johnny Dash-themed dive bars, extremely cheap beer, and bloggers with pulverizing hangovers.
MEGAN: HuffPo has been Twittering it.
SPENCER: I have met a lot of FDL commenters, who rule; Brandon Friedman of VetVoice gave Wesley Clark a terrorist fist jab at the keynote; I was told to pipe down because I was telling off-color stories during Howard Dean's keynote.
MEGAN: I get told that a lot, too, but really? Howard Dean is that important to listen to?
SPENCER: yeah, Nico asked me if I'd be on the HuffPo twitter feed, but that would require unlocking my Twitter and inviting people I don't know to see it, and there's a lot of stuff that I really don't want to make public on there.
MEGAN: I know, because you never accepted even me as one of your Twitter friends. I'm trying not to be mad about it.
SPENCER: I didn't? I'll put you on. Anyway we should probably talk about the news and shit.
MEGAN: Yeah, probably. So, at an ad conference, someone asked Arianna to play Karl Rove and run plays against Obama. Arianna's not that creative, but hearing her say aloud what we all know is going on at RNC HQ is sort of freaky.

Barack Obama may be Muslim, we're not sure, but he is definitely a Muslim sympathizer. He is the candidate of Hamas. He wants to negotiate with terrorists. He does, basically, not really care for America.

Also, she said "Hawai'i barely counts" as growing up in America and Michelle is "angry and bitter."
SPENCER: The first piece of Obama literature I saw when I got here was a doorknob flyer that read COMMITTED CHRISTIAN.
MEGAN: Which is part of the current messaging that this committed agnostic (no, it's not an oxymoron) doesn't really love, but whatevs.
SPENCER: Arianna's probably right that the sotto voce campaign will move away from the statement "Obama is a Muslim" to "We can't be sure that Obama isn't a Muslim". At this point, it's a safer play to make that sort of epistemic claim — there's absolutely no way Obama could disprove it, it's not the sort of statement that admits of the facts, as they taught me in epistemology class.
MEGAN: Hasn't it already?
SPENCER: It has? My prediction has come true already? See, that's why I'm an A-list blogger.
MEGAN: Indeed! I mean, it's (not to bring up old wounds here) but totally where Clinton went, "I have no reason to doubt it" and "not that I know" and such.
SPENCER: Let's. Not. Talk. About. That.
SPENCER: There is sooooooo much relief-slash-jubilation that the primary is over here — at our FDL caucus yesterday, a review of the last year on the blog tread delicately on the subject of the Great Interfamilial Unpleasantness.
MEGAN: I'm glad at least some bitches are hugging it out after the whole Ricki Lieberman thing that left a bad taste in my mouth. So, moving on to something everyone can be pissed about, there's a new anti-Michelle ad.
SPENCER: YES LET'S. It actually ends with these women pledging allegiance, and what's up with that Reagan quote at the end? "Freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction?" is that like, a threat?
MEGAN: Yes, the Pledge of Allegiance, the vaguely martial music and the use of all women in the add is rather pointed. All in all, still shit but far better done than the North Carolina ad.
SPENCER: Did you see the NYT/CBS poll about Michelle Obama? Her negatives are stunning, or, rather, the racial discrepancy in views of Michelle is stunning

There was even racial dissension over Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle: She was viewed favorably by 58 percent of black voters, compared with 24 percent of white voters.

MEGAN: Yeah, that would be what freaks me out a little more, that and the whole "where are the feminists that are so opposed to sexism in the media" doing right now?
SPENCER: What accounts for this, Megan?
MEGAN: Oh, God, where to start? I mean, mean girls, the legitimacy of female anger, fear of strong women, envy... Did I ever tell you I have actually met people that have never met a black person until they were an adult. And I'm not talking until they were 18 and went off to college, I'm talking as a legitimate adult. They still exist. They aren't few in number. I mean, I think we've seen this reflected in Crappy Hour comments before:

Nearly 60 percent of black respondents said race relations were generally bad, compared with 34 percent of whites. Four in 10 blacks say that there has been no progress in recent years in eliminating racial discrimination; fewer than 2 in 10 whites say the same thing. And about one-quarter of white respondents said they thought that too much had been made of racial barriers facing black people, while one-half of black respondents said not enough had been made of racial impediments faced by blacks.

I think this is also horrifying and telling:

Nearly 70 percent of blacks said they had encountered a specific instance of discrimination based on their race, compared with 62 percent in 2000; 26 percent of whites said they had been the victim of racial discrimination. (Over 50 percent of Hispanics said they had been the victim of racial discrimination.)

Seventy percent of blacks have encountered at least one incident of racial discrimination. And I'm one of the 26 percent, as once when I broke up a party as an RA in college, I was called a "racist Jewish bitch." And I still know that's nothing by comparison.
SPENCER: Can I tell a story here? I once had this girlfriend who grew up in a mostly-white area, and I took her to my mom's house in Flatbush for the first time. Flatbush is majority-black but rather internally diverse — lots of immigrants from West Africa, the Caribbean (Haiti esp) as well as African-American; and it also contains Russians and Jews. As we were driving down Foster Ave, my GF took a look at the people on the street and said, "So, does your mom's house have a blackyard?". True story
MEGAN: Whoa. Um, how long until you broke up with her?
SPENCER: You were called a Jew?
MEGAN: Yes. A racist Jew because as an RA, I was breaking up a loud frat party 4 doors down from my apartment during finals week and it happened to be the one African-American fraternity on campus. And, obviously, I was just doing it because I hated them and not because I had a 17 page paper to finish and a 25 page paper to finish by the next day and it was finals week and because they were heard by the head of housing. But, yes, Jewish.
SPENCER: So, seriously, where's the organized defense of Michelle Obama? She's an extremely accomplished woman and while she may not have been the professional powerhouse that HRC was by 1992, I don't understand why organized feminism doesn't evidently identify with her. that was badly expressed — I'm hungover — but you get what i'm saying i hope.
MEGAN: No, I think it was said pretty well, it's close to how I've said it. Where's Geraldine Ferraro decrying the attacks by the media on her working status? Where's Gloria Steinem's impassioned defense of righteous anger and women? Did we all just admit that sexism triumphed and go home? Is it only sexism if it's Hillary?
SPENCER: A couple months ago, my friend Ann Friedman of TAP and Feministing wrote a really prescient piece called "Solidarity Politics" about this sort of thing

Let's make this election about the issues, everyone says — and rightfully so. Our presidential nominee should be chosen primarily on the issues. But most of us don't separate issues from identity as cleanly as we'd like to believe. When it comes down to it, everyone is an "identity politics" voter. The problem is that phrase, as commonly used by right-wingers and some on the left who are tone-deaf on issues of race and gender, has the effect of cutting down the political choices and involvement of women, people of color, and gays and lesbians.

MEGAN: I have to say, please introduce me to Ann sometime and I promise not to fan girl out. I almost always really love her stuff — thoughtful, well-written, etc.
SPENCER: and Ann is right about this, but the character assassination of Michelle Obama demonstrates that the argument needs to be taken a step further — recognizing that cross-cutting identities within the context of identity politics is fucking up people's expectations too
MEGAN: I took the best class ever in college in Microsociology (mind-blowing topic) and one of the things that stuck with me was the professor's assertion that we are a collection of equally accurate but not equally relevant identities and roles.
SPENCER: You were saying in the car yesterday that there's a cohort within the feminist movement that's increasingly indistinguishable from an HRC machine and how bad that is for the movement as a whole — it was a really good point that you should tease out for the benefit of CH readers.
MEGAN: Like, because you're white, you'd never call me your white friend, or because we know a zillion bloggers, you'd never call me your blogger friend. I'd never introduce myself to your friends as Pam's sister or Butch's daughter or Greg's ex-girlfriend.
SPENCER: Or George Costanza's father's lawyer.
MEGAN: Yes, exactly. And so I feel like, for many people and sadly probably too many women, the identity that more people associate with Michelle Obama right now is that she's black. Not that she's a woman, or a lawyer, a wife, a mother or anything else. And that's why the Obama campaign is trying to play up the prominence of those roles.
SPENCER: It's depressing that a core mission of the Obama campaign is to teach white America that black people are, like, people.
MEGAN: Or like people, commas deliberately excluded.

The Feminine Mistake [Wash Post]

By the end of a season spent viewing the most thought-provoking and revelatory and turnout-generating political showdown in recent history transpire between a black man and a woman, few but the likes of Pat Buchanan, one of Nixonland's most heinously cynical architects, and Schlafly surrogates like Charlotte Allen seemed willing to cling without reservations to the scraps of angry white male ideology that has so laid waste to this once greatness-aspiring society. More people changed or were encouraged to entertain changing their minds during this marathon primary than in any political campaign my generation has seen, so for that, thanks Hillary. Who knows, the country may even be ready to vote for the both of you now.

MEGAN: No, the Clinton thing is totally epic, I fully support a separate post for that.
MOE: ok cool... i suppose then that we should talk about... florida and michigan, jeremiah wright, rosencrantz & gildenstern…
MEGAN: Wait, aren't they dead?
MEGAN: (Sorry, it was a pun that had to be made)
MOE: we all die is sort of the point
MEGAN: That's sort of existential for this time of the morning, I thought I was supposed to be the depressed one!

MEGAN: By the way, I meant to say, all I dreamt about last night was Bill Clinton and economic insecurity.
MOE: Dude Dodai and I saw the Sex & The City movie. All I dreamt about was…shoes.
MOE: NO NOT REALLY.
MEGAN: Aw, those would've been some awesome dreams, though.
MOE: I would say the movie made me ill, but I was ill before…it's just such A Soul Murdering Work Of Staggering Consumerism
MEGAN: Yeah, that's sort of why I went to see Indiana Jones instead. That, and the fact that my companion was a straight guy.

MEGAN: Anyway, so that that Pfleger guy is the new Wright and Obama's church is the story that shall never die even though he quit it this weekend and no one can answer the riddle of why they would continue to tape the damn sermons.
MOE: This Pfleger guy is soooooo much more fascinating than Jeremiah Wright. WHERE DID HE COME FROM? And unrelated: Did you read how there are still seven or eight Jews in Baghdad? It totally is ruling the Most Emailed List, as if it were a story about pandas or spotted owls, only that's really now how it is…anyway their synagogue closed after the war "made it too dangerous for them to worship openly." Great going, us! And everyone used to be so nice, and Muslims were nice to Jews and Sunnis were nice to Shiites, but not anymore, except that there are so few Jews that the Muslims actually are still nice to them…anyway. Back to Pfleger.

MEGAN: Right, because the only violence the Iraqi state used to countenance under Saddam Hussein was the violence that it itself committed against the Kurds and political dissidents! But, yes, Pfleger.
MOE: Dude, has someone made a mashup of this vs. Harriet Christian? Because that sort of demands to be done.
MEGAN: By the way, in point of fact, "der Pfleger" is German for "male nurse." Not that that's important.
MEGAN: Oh, God, Harriet Christian. What a wack job. "Inadequate black male," Harriet? Gosh, Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones must've loved that shit.

MOE: Seriously, okay, the thing here is 1. If it didn't sufficiently speak to Pfleger's own point that what he said was probably just as offensive to most folks as anything Jeremiah Wright said but it's harder to argue with him because he is himself white, then 2. Harriet Christian pretty much does the rest of his job for him.
MOE: And the Rosencrantz reference was MoDowd's. So unlike me, I know.
MEGAN: I don't know, was Pfleger more acceptable? Was he just the straw that broke the camel's back, or was it worse?
MOE: The thing is that this lede

They say that every president gets the psychoanalyst he deserves. And every Hamlet gets his Rosencrantz.

is typically retarded, but I remember that play being my favorite thing I'd ever read back in high school, and maybe that's why McClellan appeals! Except McClellan was probably aiming more for Guildenstern. Spokespretty Dana Perino can be Rosencrantz.
MEGAN: Is openly mocking Hillary Clinton worse than "God damn America" and "the government invented AIDS" and shit?
MOE: See, I guess I didn't see Pfleger until after I'd seen Harriet Christian. How come no one has made a mashup of this shit yet?
MEGAN: Nope. Could we set it to, like, Keystone Kops music?
MOE: Someone should do that, and then splash in some Michael Richards
MEGAN: Ooh, right.

MEGAN: Anyway, so Howard Dean (who is apparently the new devil to Hillary supporters) called Geraldine Ferraro's comments on race "outside the mainstream and unhelpful." That's a start, really.
MOE: Here's a little passage from a Chicago Tribune story about how Rev. Pfleger got into this line of work:

Clements has remained an activist ever since, leading anti-drug campaigns, encouraging black adoptions, convincing parishioners to open their hearts to ex-offenders. He often joins forces with a white activist priest, Rev. Michael Pfleger, the pastor of St. Sabina Catholic Church on the South Side. As it turns out, Pfleger was also in Marquette Park the day King was hit with the rock.

PFLEGER WAS 16, a kid from nearby Thomas Moore parish. Everywhere he went for several days leading up to the march, people in his Southwest Side neighborhood were talking about the pending march. Why couldn't they stay in their own place? They took away our old house. They took away our old neighborhood. They took away our old church. They drove us out. Now is the time to draw the line.

Pfleger and two friends hopped on their bikes and rode to the park to see if they could get a look at King, the man who was causing all the trouble. When they got to the park, it was scary. "I saw this hate," he says. "I had never seen them, my neighbors, like that. I'd never seen that side of white people."

His neighbors were cursing and throwing rocks. There were police in riot gear and there he was, King, looking calm, trying to say something to the mob. But Pfleger couldn't hear over the screams of "Niggers, go home!"

MOE:

"King was in control," Pfleger recalls. "And the more in control he was, the angrier the crowd became. I thought to myself, 'Either this man is crazy, or this man has some sort of power I want to know about.' It was the greatest, most powerful class in non-violence I'll ever get in my life."

The next day, Pfleger started reading whatever he could find about the march and about King. He cut out photos of King and taped them to the back of his bedroom closet door as a sort of shrine. Today, in his office at St. Sabina, he has half a dozen photographs of him: King addressing thousands of people at the rally at Soldier Field, King speaking at a temple on the North Shore, King and a young Jesse Jackson the night before King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.

"People ask me all the time why I became a priest," Pfleger says. "I tell them it was really a black Baptist minister who called me into ministry. My activism today was unquestionably birthed that day in Marquette Park. I think of him as a mentor."

MOE: That's from 2006
MOE: In 2002 he was involved in some controversy when a black team joined his mostly white suburban Catholic school league and parents were like "we don't want to go play there it's unsafe."
MEGAN: "I'd never seen that side of white people," kind of helpfully sums up what I think every right-thinking person's view of racism is. Like, the horror that you could be associated with something that is so very, very obviously deeply wrong.

MEGAN: The first time you see it or experience it, it should make you sick to your stomach that there are people like that in the world.
MOE: So here's the question: Geraldine Ferraro: obviously unhelpful. Michael Pfleger: more helpful than unhelpful, over the long haul, I believe. And yeah, racism is completely stomach churning the first time you experience it from your community. I mean, my initial experiences were all in Asia, which was slightly different, because it was like, my little kid friends grumbling about how Chinese spit and/or smelled and/or always insisted on touching our hair. It was beyond my comprehension at the time how they could even think those things, to be honest. It used to bother me so much. I would stand there dutifully while someone touched my hair and yearn to apologize for the Opium Wars and having an air conditioner and such. Oh… phew! Geraldine Ferraro is now back on Fox. Someone needed to put the crap back in this Crappy Hour!

MEGAN: OMG, she looks so freaking happy to be on Fox. Goddammit, Geraldine, try to look a little less self-satisfied.
MEGAN: Dude, they just completely laughed at her when she quoted Jackie Mason. I'm beginning to be uncomfortable.
MEGAN: Oh, are you kidding? She's like, "If people said that crap about Obama, we would be horrified." Oh, really, Geraldine? You mean, like, when Andrew Cuomo said that Obama cannot "shuck and jive" at a press conference and his press people successfully convinced everyone to ignore it and not a single Democratic party leader in NY or beyond called him out on it?
MOE: I'm clarifying the Pfleger thing; it was his school in the "dangerous" neighborhood, and his school was rejected from the Southside Catholic Conference or something on account of that, and then he went public with racism charges, and then a lot of Catholics were like "why couldn't he have been a little quieter about this shit."

MEGAN: Ah, lovely. Well, Chicago is such a lovely, well-planned city. Ahem.
MOE: Jesus I didn't even know what "shuck n jive" meant.

"To shuck and jive" originally referred to the intentionally misleading words and actions that African-Americans would employ in order to deceive racist Euro-Americans in power, both during the period of slavery and afterwards. The expression was documented as being in wide usage in the 1920s, but may have originated much earlier. "Shucking and jiving" was a tactic of both survival and resistance. A slave, for instance, could say eagerly, "Oh, yes, Master," and have no real intention to obey. Or an African-American man could pretend to be working hard at a task he was ordered to do, but might put up this pretense only when under observation. Both would be instances of "doin' the old shuck 'n jive."

MEGAN: Yes. It's a racist term.
MOE: Um yeah.
MEGAN: But his press people called everyone in the universe (I ought to know) and were like "he meant bobbing and waving!!! you're taking it out of context" and I was like, there's no context for that
MOE: What I wonder is if there would have been way more of those types of slips had Barack Obama been more stereotypical. Had he not been reared with such colossal reserves of cultural capital, the "something for everyone" biography, the arugula plus the brotherhood plus the atheist mom plus the Indonesian stepdad etc. etc.…had he simply been more stereotypical, had he had an "I could have been baking cookies all those years" moment. Do you think there would be more overt racism involved in his campaign? Because I did, but quotes like Cuomos

MOE: Quotes like Cuomo's just make me think it doesn't even matter. They're digging through the history books, finding the anachronistic phrases that will send messages to the right constitutents…so I guess it is less overt.
MEGAN: I mean, he's had his cookie-baking moments, in my opinion, his "stereotypical white person" about his grandmother and stuff. But, yeah, I mean, it horrifies me that either these very bright politicians are using these fucking "code" words like "shucking and jiving" and "kid" and whatever else so that people under a certain age who don't know them won't know that they're being racist and people over a certain age will get the reference. It's like Bush and his fucking evangelical code word bullshit in all his States of the Union and shit.
MOE: But like, it's just racism. You get to the point where, as we've discussed before, he's inoculated himself to this shit, to the point David Duke himself can't get it up to really hate on Obama, and yet we've got Harriet Christian of Manhattan… it makes no sense.
MEGAN: Because, I'm sorry, you don't grow up in the South when they grew up, you don't get to talk about how inspiring the civil rights movement was to you as a politician and then claim not to know.
MOE: And…re racism, institutional: did you read the Post Magazine cover story on Tatum O'Neal's drug of choice? Because I didn't have time but I should have.
MEGAN: I didn't, either, I was still all obsessing about politics, but the sentence disparities for crack v. powder cocaine are completely fucked
MOE: Here's his spiel before Congress:

My name is Michael Short. I am here because in 1992 I was sentenced for selling crack cocaine. Before that, I had never spent a day in prison. I came from a good family. I had no criminal history. I was not a violent offender. But I was sentenced to serve nearly 20 years. I was 21 years old.

They'll be chatting about the story at noon for anyone who still thinks racism exists in this country!
'
MEGAN: But, no, see, it's not racism it's racial resentment, didn't you learn anything?
MOE: Newsbreak Terror Roundup: an attack on the Danish embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, a growing sphere of influence for the Taliban, has killed six, Syria has agreed to allow IAEA weapons inspectors to check out its North Korean JV, and something about the Iraqi jail system being less terrible than before. And should we talk about Puerto Rico?
MEGAN: Oh, sure, Puerto Rico. Hillary won! Ricky Martin danced!
MOE: Oh dude, I didn't see the National Review had run six separate stories on Friday trashing McClellan. Good grief.
MEGAN: Well, you know, it's like proving that someone's not a witch by piling stones on them. When they've crushed his chest, he'll be redeemed.
MOE: Ugh, I hate the "well-worn tell-all path" line. I just don't subscribe to the "All ousted tools of the idiocracy are unhappy in the same way" line of reasoning, but if anyone tracks down his partisan ghostwriter the Prince Of Darkness…is probably too lazy but he'll get a lot of hits with misleading headlines suggesting he has!

MEGAN: I really think PoD is giving Bobby too much credit. Let's return to caling him the Earl of Minor Despair. Or the Count of Emotionally-Instigated Intestinal Distress
MOE: Wait, he has emotions?
MOE: Ya think?

Obama's Latest Pastor Disaster [Newsweek/WaPo]
Hillary Clinton Attacked At Barack Obama Church [YouTube]
Clinton Supporter Thrown Out Of Rules Committee Meeting [YouTube]
Glamoracy [Glamour]

Gerry, look, I mean, I guess I sort of understand. You grew up in a certain time and a certain place where there was this level of casual, quasi-open racism. You're 72, which isn't really that much younger than Barack Obama's sort of racist grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, 86, and we all know that he forgives her and considers that sort of typical and, frankly, so do I. But you're also a glass-ceiling-breaking politician, smart, brilliant and trailblazing, and you shouldn't have to fucking be told by someone that racism fucking exists in this country and that it pervades a lot of what goes on in this country in big and small ways. Why the hell would you, as a supposedly liberal fucking Democrat, want to wade into that pool?

So, look, the first time you opened your maw in March and said "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," I sort of wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to think it was an off-the-cuff remark, I wanted to believe that you were trying to say something only about sexism, about the dual burden of sexism and racism that women of color face in this country and you just misspoke, I wanted to buy into that dream I had as a 6 year old in 1984 that I could be like you someday and tear down barriers and stand up for the (good) things I believed in.

But you had to fucking stomp on that, didn't you. You had to "defend" your reputation, you had to call the freaking Daily Breeze back and tell them "Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?" You had to go on Fox News and say "What I find offensive is every time somebody says something about the campaign, you're accused of being racist," and let Republicans rub their slimy little hands together in anticipation of the Democratic party fall-out and your ouster from the Clinton campaign and make it look like you had no fucking clue why people were so offended that you'd suggest that a black man, a man of mixed race born in the sixties (you remember the sixties, right Geraldine? That would be the time that maybe half of the country thought Jim Crow and segregation and racial discrimination were a-okay and miscegenation laws were still on the books?) was having an easier time of it than a white woman? No, Geraldine, see, the problem was not that you were inappropriately being called a racist, it's that your idea of a defense of those charges was not to go back and apologize or clarify what you meant and then duck down for a couple of weeks, it was to attack people who were — whether rightly or wrongly in your mind — offended by your comments of being racists themselves. And so I tucked my disappointment aside and joined in the many, many calls for you to just shut the fuck up so I could go back to pretending that you were not a stupid, racist old lady who was willing to turn a blind eye (and ear) to her own defects to talk about sexism.

And then you stepped in it again, calling Obama a sexist without any evidence other than that which you said came from his "supporters" in the media and those on the ground and, Geraldine, that's not evidence that he is a sexist, so you both ruined your own (potentially good) point about the pervasiveness of sexism and, plus, frankly, no one really cares to hear a racist yell on and on about sexism because there's both but racism has an uglier face, one filled with hundreds of years of beatings and lynchings and people being classified as sub-human because of the color of their skin and wars (and that's just if you're talking racism against African-Americans). Sexism is a terrible scourge on the equality this nation promises, but it's simply not the same.

And then, today. Your editorial. Geraldine, I literally cried in frustration that you can't see what you're doing to the Democratic party, to the women's movement, to the uneasy détente between the (almost exclusively white) old guard feminists and those feminists of color who have complained for decades about the short shrift their issues have been given in the larger women's movement. What, you hadn't noticed that? You titled your piece "Healing The Wounds of Democrat's Sexism" and then you rip open the flesh of Democrats' racist wounds — you do remember the fifties and sixties well enough, I assume, to recall which party's Southern Senators kept a federal civil rights law off the books for decades, right? And you side with the so-called Reagan Democrats, those bastards that frankly kept you from the Vice Presidency, in charging the party with reverse racism.

As for Reagan Democrats, how Clinton was treated is not their issue. They are more concerned with how they have been treated. Since March, when I was accused of being racist for a statement I made about the influence of blacks on Obama's historic campaign, people have been stopping me to express a common sentiment: If you're white you can't open your mouth without being accused of being racist. They see Obama's playing the race card throughout the campaign and no one calling him for it as frightening. They're not upset with Obama because he's black; they're upset because they don't expect to be treated fairly because they're white. It's not racism that is driving them, it's racial resentment. And that is enforced because they don't believe he understands them and their problems. That when he said in South Carolina after his victory "Our Time Has Come" they believe he is telling them that their time has passed.

Racial resentment, Geraldine, is racism. Why can't you see that? People coming up to you and complaining that they can't complain about black people is them complaining for being looked down upon for being racists! And, yes, their time ought to have passed, it should pass, they should learn and understand that racism should have no place in our society and as a party leader, a stalwart, a barrier-breaker you should be breaking it to them that "getting treated fairly for being white" means losing sometimes, and sometimes it means losing to a person of color. It means you are not always going to come out ahead, it means that the advantages your fathers or mothers faced 40 or 50 years ago (or less long ago than that) because of the color of their skin should disappear and you should lose to better-qualified candidates of color and then you should not ever, ever even in the dark recesses of your small, reptilian brain think "Well, that's what affirmative action has wrought in this country," because that, Geraldine is racism. And it's there, and it's palpable and the fact that you are the educated white Reagan Democrats standard bearer for how sexism is worse than racism and it's not really racism if it's just "racial resentment" makes me sick to my fucking stomach.

And I'm gonna add this, just so you don't point to me and say, well, there's someone who doesn't understand sexism. Is there sexism? Sure, God knows I've been turned down for jobs in favor of less qualified men, replaced men in positions and not earned as much, been hooted and hollered at on the street and been called all nature of diminutives in the work environment and out and had all manner of shit thrown at me my entire life for being a smart girl or a bitchy girl and all the rest of it. But do you know what no one has ever, ever called me? The N-word. Ask around, Geraldine, it's still in use. So, I recognize that I'm damn lucky not only to be a woman (because I love being a woman even if sexism exists for the rest of my life), but that I'm lucky that in addition to putting up with sexism I don't have to put up with racism. The fact that you don't recognize that makes me deeply, deeply sad and furiously angry at the same time.

Healing The Wounds Of Democrats' Sexism [Boston Globe]
Obama Calls Grandmother 'Typical White Person' In Radio Interview [Fox News]
Clinton disagrees with Ferraro on Obama [Boston Globe]
Ferraro, Again: "Attacking Me Because I'm White" [Politico]
Gender Issue Lives On As Clinton’s Hopes Dim [NY Times]

MOE: Did you check out Geraldine Ferrarro giving Shep Smith a beej? How could someone be SO HYPER AWARE OF anything even remotely construable as "sexist" still be saying things like "black journalists who are Obama surrogates like Bob Herbert." Because yes, Bob Herbert is so simpleminded, so singlemindedly focused on electing one of "his own" that — oh yes, and the only reason he has his New York Times platform is surely tokenism in the first place — why would a progressive white woman even read him to begin with?
MOE: You know he doesn't have anything worth saying about misogyny

MEGAN: Like Shep wants a beej from a girl...
MOE: Dude
MOE: I'm shaking from anger.
MEGAN: Also she wants an "independent group to do a study on media." Like Media Matters?
MOE: Yeah maybe they should check out that Obama surrogate Bob Herbert who hasn't had anything nice to say about Hillary in the past six months because he's so sexist

MOE: OH EXCEPT WELL THIS FIVE MONTHS AGO

If there was ever a story that deserved more coverage by the news media, it’s the dark persistence of misogyny in America

MEGAN: Also, so, can we check her crazy hair? She's got a tuft sticking up in the back. How did that happen?
MOE: Okay, I can't handle it anymore, let's just have a moment of silence for Ted Kennedy's brain. I had dinner with Jennifer Gerson last night and she said that as an intern for MSNBC she was once charged with escorting him up a platform and he was outraged to find that he had to climb steps. "There were literally two steps," she said. My kind of septugenarian! Although…not if I stay in this apartment!!
MEGAN: Well, I think his knees are shit. But, yes, it doesn't surprise me. But brain cancer sucks. I'll bet he thought his heart would get him.
MOE: Okay, in another window SinisterRouge is calming me down. (Imagine if Geraldine Ferrarro was a commenter! She'd get put on notice, and then she'd just go crazy and her last comment would be something like "Hang that darkie from a tree!" and then she'd claim it was a joke and then no one would pay attention to MY brand of "controversy" anymore.)
MEGAN: I love that she's the one calming you down today. I mean, Ferraro just makes me sad. I'm sad that's she's turned into this caricature of a nasty old woman whose racism shows and who is so concerned with her supposed victimhood that she dismisses the claims of others. She was the first female candidate for the vice presidency of the United motherfucking States of America and she's stomping all over the legacy of that. I realize that not everyone reading this would remember, but I remember 1984 and I remember thinking it was, like, totally normal that a woman be running and then realizing it wasn't and thus how cool she was. Only now she's not cool. So I'm more saddened than outraged.

MOE: Uh, in other news Hillary won Kentucky by a 30-point margin. Um, dumb question: are there no black people in Kentucky or something? What's up with that? Also oil went above $130 a barrel, another new record.
MEGAN: I have deliberately avoided looking at gas prices while in New York, a situation helped by the fact that the only times I've passed any have been in a cab and I've been intoxicated. I'm sure they're high.
MOE: A friend of mine asked me the other day why oil prices were so expensive and I was like "1. China 2. India 3. The market tends to overreact 4. no exploration or real incentive for exploration." But I forgot to add "the dollar." And seriously regarding the exploration thing I'm not sure whether that's still true.
MEGAN: Also, Obama barely campaigned in Kentucky. I think despite his crazy fundraising skills, he's conserving his money at this point to get through the convention and Pennsylvania sort of proved that sometimes its just a waste. He doesn't need Kentucky, so he didn't spend so much to make that margin tigihter.
MOE: Kentucky is only like 7.5% black.

Gross reports having students of his at the University of Kentucky tell him they had never seen or talked to a black person before coming to Lexington, a college town of nearly 300,000 people. In some areas of Kentucky, Gross says there's perhaps only one or two black families there.

MOE: Also Kentucky declared neutrality during the Civil War…
MEGAN: I actually met someone once in her forties who had never seen a black person until she left her state. It was, um, interesting. I'm amazed it still happens.
MOE: Though it was a slave state and in the early 1830s slaves comprised a quarter of the population. They just never had much of a plantation economy…Is it possible my perception of Kentucky has been skewed because some huckster from Indiana decided to dress in "stereotypical Southern gentleman type clothing to promote his restaurant chain"?? Um why yes it may be!
MOE: Oh in other news Hezbollah has veto power over everything the Lebanese government does now.
MEGAN: Oh, well, that's great. I love how having the power to scuttle stuff is important.

MEGAN: Kentucky was an okay state. I drove through it once. It was sorta pretty, plus, obviously, bourbon.
MOE: OBVIOUSLY
MOE: So, here's something else. I was on the train yesterday with this lady who was really nice and let me use her phone. Her computer said "Property of the World Bank" and she told me how she was coming up to New York to present a new survey on economic development and by George it would appear she was not pulling a fast one on me! And check this:

But departing from free-market orthodoxy, the panel also said that governments had a far greater role to play in development than was recognized in the markets-are-king 1980s and 1990s. To boost growth, the panel urged developing nations to spend heavily on infrastructure and endorsed, with some reservation, government subsidies to build local industries.

MOE: You don't say!

Among the findings that are bound to stoke the most controversy: democracy isn't essential for growth. Autocratic governments that allow "vigorous debate" internally on economic policies are sufficient, the report said. Free trade isn't a prerequisite either. Some fast-growing economies kept barriers high to imports, even as they promoted exports, the report said.

MEGAN: Oh, wait, someone noticed China! Cool!
MOE: Well yeah and who did China notice? Why…Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia and also Thailand!
MOE: But what I really love is this:

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers praised the commission's focus on government-led growth policies, but said its emphasis on economic winners didn't fully take into account how industrial policies deepened corruption in many countries and failed to ignite growth there. "It's like looking only at those who made fortunes in the stock market without diversifying their portfolios" to figure out the best way to get rich, he said.

MEGAN: Indonesia's kind of a hot mess, though, and has oil/natural gas, so I think that's a little different. But otherwise, I agree with your list.
MOE: Um, actually, looking at the United States economy is what that is like.

MOE: Well yes, Indonesia is an incredible mess, which is why China managed to grab so much manufacturing business from them as Suharto's government crumbled.
MEGAN: Indonesia is one of those places I'd really like to visit. I don't know why. I wish I was like my friend Tim, who parlayed a Masters in theology to a job as an investment banker, saved a shitload of money and bailed on life to travel the world for a year. I am really jealous of him right now, and not just because I keep looking at his flickr account.
MOE: Which speaks to Larry Summers' point, but the fact is that Korea and Taiwan both paid close attention to Japan's climb up the "economic value ladder" into more sophisticated manufacturing. When you manufacture computer chips, for instance, which are by definition very small and shrink in size every 18 months, the cost of sending them down the Insatiable Consumption Esophagus toward the US is not that great. So your population can eventually see much more of the cost! But semiconductor plants are incredibly expensive and sophisticated to operate, so while they're harder to transplant in other countries — though the Taiwanese have certainly been doing just that in China despite the fact that you still can't get a direct flight between the two countries — they also require a lot of PLANNING. INVESTMENT. An educational strategy.
MOE: And then! Much to the chagrin of shareholders…semiconductors are a highly cyclical business! So while the demand keeps growing, sometimes you have to sell them at a loss!
MOE: It can be painfully low-margin…again something the market doesn't reward!
MEGAN: Oh, God, stop, visions of grad school case study horrors dancing in my head!
MOE: BUT. Your countrymen will thank you!
MOE: Sorry, it just completely kills me that you mention how we need better economic and industrial planning in this country to some people and they act like you're fucking advocating the next Great Leap Forward.
MEGAN: I mean, the problem with industrial planning is that you take the concept, throw in 20,000 businsess lobbyists and 535 Members and Senators and you come up with a bullshit plan that won't help anyone that really needs it and will help whomever has the political capital to get help. Ahhh, democracy.

• "They're not listening to me because they're out of touch with reality and the Republican Party. We are the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan and this kind of campaigning is unacceptable. I've done everything that I can to repudiate and to see that this kind of campaigning does not continue." That's the seventysomething presumptive nominee for the Republican presidential candidate, who may just be sufficiently out of touch with the party of Strom Thurmond, Tom DeLay and Dick Cheney to win the election, on the not-so-subtle Obama attack ad you can watch after the jump. [Reuters]
  
• And you fucking know what? We'll be bombing Iran and the hedge funds will have figured out how to directly short-sell human life but at least we will have a president who wants to put an end to this shit. [WSJ]
  
• Here's an inspiring story for those of you who have ever been fired and worry you'll never get another job in this economy (what with consumer confidence at a 26-year-low) because you have a criminal record and/or lost your last company $7 billion or something like that: Jerome Kerviel got a job! [WSJ]

• I am really glad they finally found some tool to tell the Wall Street Journal reading masses to start stockpiling food as an investment strategy because you could be sentenced to life in prison for doing that same thing in the Philippines, but we believe in Freedom in America, and I don't know about you but I am proud of my country. [WSJ]
  
• Dan Gillerman, the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, called Jimmy Carter a "bigot," which sort of reminds me of Geraldine Ferraro said she was a victim of racism but okay. [AP]
  
• T.G.I.Peggy! "America is in line at the airport. America has its shoes off, is carrying a rubberized bin, is going through a magnetometer. America is worried there is fungus on the floor after a million stockinged feet have walked on it. But America knows not to ask. America is guilty until proved innocent, and no one wants to draw undue attention. America left its ticket and passport in the jacket in the bin in the X-ray machine, and is admonished. America is embarrassed to have put one one-ounce moisturizer too many in the see-through bag. America is irritated that the TSA agent removed its mascara, opened it, put it to her nose, and smelled it." Anyway, Peggy Noonan took a long (strange!) trip across the country and gave a ton of anti-Bush speeches to crowds in conservative spider holes such as Lubbock, Texas so we could be safe in the knowledge that there is not a single person is left in America who approves of the guy. Why fucking everyone on the internet can't write in a style so ideally suited to multiple drinks on Fridays is why we need to elect Barack Obama I guess [WSJ]