A top figure in the Democratic Party who has played a key role in raising money for Hillary Clinton Wednesday stepped down from the presidential campaign amidst a fracas over alleged racist remarks.
Geraldine Ferraro, the only woman to ever run for the vice presidency in 1984 and a former member of Congress, said she was stepping down to protect Senator Clinton from further attacks by Senator Barack Obama's campaign. "The Obama campaign is attacking me to hurt you. I won't let that happen," Ferraro wrote in a letter to Clinton published by CNN.
Race and gender are never far from the surface of the historic, hard-fought scramble for the Democratic US presidential nomination, and never more so than when Ferraro said Obama had an advantage because he was black. Ferraro told the Daily Breeze newspaper of Torrance, California, that "if Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position" of leading in the tight race.
Obama, 46, grabbed another state primary prize Tuesday by winning Mississippi Democrats to his side. With only eight of the 50 states left to vote, the rivals are separated by only about 130 of the more than 3,000 delegates elected so far.
The nominee needs 2,025 delegates to win victory at the nominating convention in Denver, Colorado in August. Presidential elections are November 4.
Clinton said she does not agree with Ferraro's remarks, and called for both campaigns to "stay focused on issues that matter to the American people."
Obama dismissed the fundraiser's remarks as "absurd" and "ridiculous." "I think that if anybody was looking for the quickest path to the presidency, they would not say I want to be an African-American man named Barack Obama," Obama told ABC news.
The fracas echoes furor in the Obama campaign after the South Carolina primary earlier this year, when Clinton's husband, former president Bill Clinton, indicated it was only natural that Obama would win the heavily black state.
The historic Democratic presidential campaign finds Clinton and Obama trying to break sex and race barriers on their way to the White House - a watershed campaign that represents a century-long fight for sexual and racial equality in the US.
Along the way, as job barriers have fallen under the hammer of court judgements and new laws, women and ethnic minorities have often had to compete for the same liberalised job openings, at the same time fighting off charges that they got where they were because of tokenism and racial or sexual quotas. Obama's campaign apparently interpreted Ferraro's remarks as implying the same.
In talk shows Wednesday morning, Ferraro defended her remarks, saying they had been misinterpreted by the Obama campaign. "It wasn't a racist comment, it was a statement of fact," she told CBS. She noted that she was comparing Obama's campaign to her own historic campaign in 1984, when if her name had been "Gerard Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro, I would never have been the nominee for vice president."
She also defiantly told the California newspaper that any remarks criticising Obama's campaign bring accusations "of being racist, so you have to shut up." "Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?" she was quoted as saying.
In her resignation letter to Clinton, Ferraro said she was stepping down "so I can speak for myself and you can continue to speak for yourself about what is at stake in this campaign."
Ferraro said she would not stop raising money for Clinton's presidential bid. After a rush through 42 state campaigns since January, Obama and Clinton have a six-week lull before the next major battle for the delegate-rich state of Pennsylvania on April 22.
With so much at stake, the campaign has become increasingly sharp and personal. Samantha Power, a Harvard University professor and top Obama advisor on foreign policy, was forced to resign from the campaign last week after calling Clinton "a monster" in an interview with The Scotsman newspaper. Clinton herself has suggested Obama is unfit to be commander in chief.
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