CNN is reporting that Geraldine Ferraro has stepped down from her post in the Clinton campaign. The CNN story quotes remarks by Ferraro and Ronald Reagan as reported in a 1988 Washington Post article. According to the Post Ferraro’s remarks then about Jackson were very similar to her remarks yesterday about Obama, and Reagan claimed that the press “did not ask Jackson tough questions because of his race.”

Clinton’s reply when questioned about Ferraro’s remarks echoed her reply to CBS reporters about remarks by her Texas supporter, Adelfa Callejo: “People get to express their opinions.”

— unless the people in question are Barack Obama and Louis Farrakhan, and Clinton has an opportunity to score some points against anti-Semitism.

Last week my guy was the Islamofascist candidate for the Democratic nomination. This week he is the affirmative action candidate. As Geraldine Ferraro has now famously put the case:

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.

Clinton says she disagrees. According to Marc Ambinder, “Arlington Center aides say that Clinton does not feel as if she has to apologize for Ferraro’s comments; after all, they are Ferraro’s, not her own.” No more her own than say, Louis Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic statements were her opponent’s?

I think the Clinton forces have inserted various wingnut issues into the campaign for the democratic nomination in a way that gives Clinton, herself, deniability, as a part of what has been termed the kitchen sink strategy. To be fair, some of this appears to be opportunistic, but it’s worth noting that Clinton’s disclaimers are pretty pale when they occur, pale enough to let the perpetrators off the hook. And the kitchen sink strategy started long before the most recent primaries, at least as far back as South Carolina when Bill Clinton campared Obama to Jesse Jackson.

If Obama is running a themed campaign with a clear goal, however idealistic, and it think it’s fair to say that he is, Clinton’s campaign has put the candidate, herself, at its center and seems bent on gaming the system at every turn in order to advance her cause. If some of the gaming is opportunistic, some of it is not. When you run a campaign that is primarily about yourself, you have to belittle your opponent.

The belittling strategy is called “let’s address reality and the problems we’re facing in this world,” according to Ferraro. That’s code for “Let’s talk about the inferiority of Obama, who has nothing to offer the country but words.” The focus on language is telling because it attacks a part of Obama’s identity. It’s pretty easy for such a focus to drift into other areas: race, religion, attacks on Obama’s constituents as groupies or cultists, etc.

— or is it drifting?

P. S. Tim Burke has a great post about this today.

In a New York Times op-ed piece today, entitled “Playing by Clinton Rules,” David Brooks says a number of very practical and true things about my guy’s campaign. One of these things that cuts through a welter of punditry is that the consultants advising Obama to mount a negative campaign are pursuing an interest of their own.

The consultants, needless to say, gravitate toward the tactical interpretation. And once again the cry has gone up for Obama to get tough. This advice gets wrapped in metaphors. Obama has to start “throwing punches” or “taking the gloves off.”

Beneath the euphemisms, what the advice really means is that Obama has to start accusing Clinton of things.

I signed on to this advice yesterday, having been momentarily persuaded that Obama needs to fight back, but I shouldn’t have. It’s bad advice.

The main reason it’s bad advice is that if Obama turns negative, he betrays his own core message. Here’s how Brooks describes that message:

Barack Obama had a theory. It was that the voters are tired of the partisan paralysis of the past 20 years. The theory was that if Obama could inspire a grass-roots movement with a new kind of leadership, he could ride it to the White House and end gridlock in Washington.

For some time now, I’ve thought there are two parts to Obama’s theory: first, the one that Brooks identifies, that there is a strong backlash in the country against what Obama has described as the old politics of negativity and ideological posturing; but second, and equally important, that a grassroots rejection of the old politics is possible: that is, that citizens can wrest control of this country and their own destinies away from the elites who are presently in charge. And not just from the Bush regime — as the argument over delegates to the Democratic Convention and the present structure of the Clinton campaign both illustrate, there are powerful forces in the Democratic party ranked in opposition to Obama’s grassroots appeal.

Like Brooks I think Obama stands or falls on the basis of his core message. I’ve said earlier that he can lose even if he wins. The worst loss would be for him to abandon his principles and get into the knock-down-drag-out Clinton has been trying to draw him into since Iowa. Here’s Brooks again:

Clinton can’t compete on personality, but a knife fight is her only real hope of victory. She has nothing to lose because she never promised to purify America. Her campaign doesn’t depend on the enthusiasm of upper-middle-class goo-goos.

Leaving aside the gratuitous swipe at Obama’s core constituency (which, by the way isn’t true; most of the people I saw at the Obama rally in St. Louis weren’t upper-middle-class goo-goos, nor am I such a person). But leaving that aside, and leaving aside the claims that Obama has promised to purify the country and that Clinton’s personality is unattractive (also untrue in my view), I think Brooks is right in saying that Clinton has everything to gain from a dirty, negative campaign, at least in the short run, and Obama has everything to lose.

Instead, the Obama campaign might consider trying harder to connect with those groups among the electorate with whom Obama tends to do poorly. This might turn out to be very important in Pennsylvania. As Brooks puts it, Obama needs to explain “how this new politics would actually produce bread-and-butter benefits to people in places like Youngstown and Altoona,” linking Pennsylvania with Ohio where primary results might be taken to illustrate Obama’s characteristic weaknesses. According to Eugene Robinson, Obama needs a new speech, needs “to find a way to speak to white, working-class, high school-educated voters about their anxieties and their aspirations.” Robinson seems to think that winning in Pennsylvania might sew things up for Obama. I’m not that optimistic. I think Clinton will fight to the end and that her ultimate weapon will be to attempt to persuade the party elite to take her side because she is “best” or “most electable.”

So — Obama and his movement must overcome entrenched elites in at least three places if they are to succeed in changing the country. First, they must overcome the organization and leadership of the Democratic party in order to get the nomination; second, they must overcome the leadership of the Republican party and its able standard bearer, John McCain (whose campaign against Obama has already been scripted by the Clinton forces in the Democratic party), in order to be elected; and third, they must overcome the gridlock in Washington with its hyperpartisanship and institutionalized incumbency, in order to govern.

It’s a big job. Maybe it’s too big. But if that’s so, it’s too bad. It means that our politics can no longer be renewed by an appeal to democracy. And it means moreover that the political decadence we have witnessed since the Reagan years has become the rule in American life.