Hung Out to Dry

The cable networks last night, distracted by Spitzer, treated Barack Obama's win in Mississippi as minor, predictable news, and Fox and MSNBC soon went back to Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann.

"Barack Obama rolled up a commanding victory Tuesday in the Mississippi primary, padding his delegate lead and gaining a psychological boost ahead of next month's big Democratic showdown in Pennsylvania," says the L.A. Times.

"The results reflected a stark racial divide; more than nine in 10 African Americans voted for Obama, while Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won the votes of seven in 10 whites, according to exit polls. Black voters accounted for roughly half the turnout." Late returns put the margin at 61-37.

Another day, another surrogate, another flap, as the Boston Globe reports:

"Geraldine Ferraro, the 1984 Democratic nominee for vice president, is the latest high-profile supporter to ignite an uproar in the Democratic race with a controversial comment.

"Ferraro, who backs Hillary Clinton and is raising money for her, was excoriated yesterday by Barack Obama's campaign for suggesting that he wouldn't be a contender if he were a white man or a woman of any color. 'He happens to be very lucky who he is,' she told a newspaper in California last week. The country, she said, is 'caught up in the concept' of the first African-American president.

"Yesterday morning on MSNBC, Obama adviser Susan Rice called the comment 'outrageous and offensive' and called on the Clinton camp to repudiate it."

Hillary expressed regret, but Ferraro called back the Daily Breeze to say: "Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let's address reality and the problems we're facing in this world, you're accused of being racist, so you have to shut up."

HuffPoster Seth Grahame-Smith, a self-described Hillary apologist, has had enough:

"If she does manage to secure the nomination, what about the scores of disenfranchised Obama supporters (many of them young people with little loyalty to the Democratic Party)? How will she bring them back into the tent? Hillary seems confident that this can be remedied by offering Mr. Obama a spot on her ticket. Really? And what would his motivation be for accepting? Playing third-fiddle to Bill?

"However, if Mr. Obama goes on to secure the nomination, she'll have handed his rival a treasure trove of sound bites . . . She's proven that she cares more about 'Hillary' than 'unity.' More about defeating Obama than defeating the Republicans. She's become a political suicide-bomber, happy to blow herself to bits -- as long as she takes everyone else with her."

What about Obama's attacks on her? Big Tent Democrat takes it in stride: