Commentary - Jules Witcover: The surrogate problem

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been kept busy lately putting distance between themselves and campaign supporters and advisers whose loose tongues have created distracting miniflaps. The former first lady has said herself that backers in both camps have said things that would better have been left unsaid, and should not draw Democrats’ attention away from the serious issues of the day.

But such diversions are the inevitable result of campaigns flooding the airwaves and cyberspace with comments by surrogates boosting their candidates or undercutting the opposition. The open megaphone of today’s political discourse only magnifies the freewheeling dialogue.

The latest example is former Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro’s observation to a small California newspaper that “if Obama was a white man he would not be in this position,” apparently meaning front-runner for their party’s presidential nomination. She added, “And if he was a woman, he would not be in this position.”

It was a remarkable comment coming from a woman who 24 years ago was chosen to be Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale’s running mate clearly due to sex. Mondale’s campaign sought to present her, as presidential nominees always do, as supremely qualified to take over the presidency if anything were to happen to him. But the notion was preposterous on its face.

Mondale, running far behind incumbent President Ronald Reagan in all the polls, resorted to the political equivalent of football’s desperation Hail Mary pass by choosing Ferraro as the first woman ever nominated to a major party’s national ticket.

At the time, she was a not particularly distinguished member of the House from New York, and although her nomination did generate considerable excitement and support among female voters, the Hail Mary fell incomplete on Election Day.

Ferraro acknowledged as much herself in a subsequent interview with Fox News, saying Obama was the front-runner “in large measure because he is black,” adding, “Let me also say in 1984 — and if I have said it once, I have said it twenty, sixty, a hundred times — in 1984, if my name was Gerard Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro, I would never have been the nominee for vice president.”

The trouble with that analogy is that at the time Mondale selected her, many political figures believed that having the first woman on the ticket might possibly boost Mondale’s chances, inasmuch as about half the electorate was female.

Today, with the African-American population only about 13 percent according to 2002 census figures, it would be much more conjectural to argue that having a black on a national ticket would in itself mean victory, even with Obama’s extraordinarily high support among blacks.

One of the most distinguishing characteristics of this year’s presidential campaign has been how little open discussion there has been on race. One reason may be that Obama, unlike previous black candidates Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, did not come out of the militant and oftentimes divisive civil rights movement, and he has made a much broader argument beyond racial inequality.

Ferraro is not the only surrogate whose remarks drew criticism. So did Bill Clinton’s comparison of Obama with Jackson in the South Carolina primary, and more recently Obama foreign-policy adviser Samantha Power’s labeling Hillary Clinton a “monster.” Power also raised eyebrows by suggesting Obama’s campaign plans for withdrawing troops from Iraq might vary once he became president. After talking with the candidate, she resigned from the campaign.

Hillary Clinton said of all such remarks, “It is regrettable that any of our supporters on both sides ... say things that kind of veer off into the personal.” She has dissociated herself from Ferraro’s remarks, leaving her to resign as a member of the Clinton campaign finance committee.

Surrogates are customarily admonished that their campaign must “speak with one voice.” But it’s hard to enforce — especially when the surrogates have high profiles of their own, such as a former vice presidential nominee, or a former president.

Jules Witcover is a Baltimore Examiner columnist. His latest book, on the Nixon-Agnew relationship, “Very Strange Bedfellows,” has just been published by Public Affairs Press. You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@earthlink.net.