Opinions: Welcome to mud-slinging madness

 by Dimple Dhanini
 published on Friday, March 28, 2008

The Democratic Party's presidential campaign is getting increasingly interesting as members of either camp have started resorting to name-calling and making false accusations toward one another. In the fervor, however, many are neglecting the true implications of what the accusations mean.

Recently, a member of Hillary Clinton's finance committee, Geraldine Ferraro, made some contentious comments and told The Daily Breeze, a 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." What Ferraro is implying is that Obama's campaign is literally affirmative action run amok.

I suppose Obama is lucky to be who he is. We are talking about Barrack Hussein Obama. With the middle name Hussein, his running for president during a time of terrorism is not just lucky, it is a miracle.

The claims of the Clinton campaign reject any notion of racial inequality that exists in America and put Clinton on a false pedestal. Obama is not more a product of affirmative action than Hillary Clinton. There is no purpose or pleasure in playing who is the most advantaged or disadvantaged in a white woman versus black man presidential campaign.

To balance out the campaigns, the Clinton campaign called for Obama adviser Samantha Power to resign after she had called Clinton "a monster." But the conditions under which she accused Clinton of being a monster were overlooked in the fervor. Power had made these accusations when referencing Clinton's claims that she had help bring peace to Northern Ireland.

However, as former minister of the province and a Nobel prize winner, Lord Trimble stated in the U.K.'s Telegraph newspaper: "I don't want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player."

True that, Lord Trimble; saying that you won the championship when you were only a cheerleader is absolutely absurd. But Clinton did have the guts to say she brought peace to a region and stand by her words even when they were denounced by many involved. She will stand by the truth, even when it is false, and prove everyone wrong.

Power, the Obama campaign member, had made these remarks to a Scottish newspaper and said that Clinton "…is a monster, too — that is off the record — she is stooping to anything." Not only were these comments supposed to be shielded from the public eye, but Power actually apologized for them shortly thereafter.

This is more than we can say for Geraldine Ferraro who, like Clinton, stood by her words and said in the New York Times that "Every time [Obama's] campaign is upset about something, they call it racist … I will not be discriminated against because I'm white. If they think they're going to shut up Geraldine Ferraro with that kind of stuff, they don't know me."

Remedying Obama's disapproval with an immature "you don't know me!" shows the true nature of Ferraro's comments.

In Samantha Power's defense, if I had known that a presidential candidate had said something like what Clinton had said, I would have had some choice words for them myself.

Dimple can be reached by e-mail at: dimple.dhanani@asu.edu.