WASHINGTON – Geraldine Ferraro abruptly resigned her post in Hillary Rodham Clinton‘s fund-raising team yesterday, days after touching off a racial furor by saying Barack Obama was ahead in the Democratic race because he’s black.
Ferraro, a former Queens congresswoman who became the first woman nominated for vice president, denied her comment was racist and charged it was being exploited by Sen. Obama’s camp.
“The Obama campaign is attacking me to hurt you,” she wrote to Sen. Clinton in a letter resigning from the candidate’s finance committee. “I won’t let that happen.”
Last week, Ferraro, who ran as Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984, told the Daily Breeze of Torrance, Calif., “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position.”
That provoked outrage from the Obama camp, which cited a pattern in racially charged remarks from Clinton supporters.
Obama went on the attack yesterday on NBC’s “Today Show.” After calling Ferraro a trailblazer, he said she was participating in “the kind of slice-and-dice politics that’s about race and about gender and about this and that, and that’s what Americans are tired of because they recognize that when we divide ourselves in that way, we can’t solve problems.”
Early yesterday, Ferraro stood her ground and hit back.
“Every time somebody opens their mouth [in the Clinton campaign], Bill Clinton, racist; Ed Rendell, racist,” Ferraro said sarcastically on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
But yesterday afternoon, Ferraro said she had sent the letter to Clinton announcing she was “stepping down so I can speak for myself and you can speak for yourself about what is at stake in this campaign.”
Campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson said Ferraro left on her own initiative.
In a speech in Chicago earlier, Obama brought up Ferraro when he ripped Clinton for playing politics.
“This moment, in this election, is our chance to put an end to a divisive politics that has done nothing to keep America safe,” Obama fumed.
He was flanked by admirals and generals who support him.
“Instead of a serious, substantive debate, we’ve heard vague allusions to a ‘commander-in-chief threshold’ that seems to be about nothing more than the number of years you’ve spent in Washington,” he said.
“After years of being told that Democrats have to talk, act and vote like John McCain to pass some commander-in-chief test, how many times do we have to learn that tough talk is not a substitute for sound judgment?”
Obama’s broadsides underscore a more aggressive strategy by his campaign to challenge Clinton’s assertions that he isn’t ready to lead the nation’s military.