What's Happened to Geraldine Ferraro?

Ferraro on the Attack:
Why has 1984 Democratic vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro taken such a liking to laying into the party's current front-runner for its top spot, Barack Obama? The former New York Congresswoman was dismissed from her position on Hillary Clinton's finance committee in March after remarking that Obama has received such wide notoriety and popularity due primarily to his race and the fact that no African-American candidate has ever had such an opportunity to ascend to the U.S.' top political post. While Obama brushed aside the comment and continued on in his quest for the White House, Ferraro continues to speak out against him and what she argues has been unfair, sexist media coverage of Senator Clinton.

Allegations of sexism in any regard are serious and should be scrutinized intensely. However, Ferraro's charges seem more like those of a bittered game-maker with a bone to pick than a dedicated Democratic activist, committed to the party's victory come November. Indeed, in a letter to the editor published in Friday's edition of the Boston Globe, Ferraro expanded her assault on Obama, charging that the senator would be incapable of connecting with white, blue-collar workers in the general election, likely basing her comments on Clinton's wide primary victory margins in states with high levels of working class whites, such as West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

These charges, of course, are nothing new. Indeed, Obama has warded off such claims of an inability to connect whenever and wherever they've appeared. However, coming from Ferraro, they are particularly unsettling. Here is a candidate who knows all too well the lack of constructiveness fostered by arguments suggesting that a candidate, due to an inherent personal trait, such as race, gender, or sexual orientation, might be unable to relate to a certain sect of voters. Here is a candidate who has witnessed the disastrous results of Democrats attacking one another on anything but the merits. And here is a candidate who should, perhaps more than anyone, understand that, when voters get away from looking at a candidate's competence and ability to effectively lead, the whole country loses. She, however, seems to have forgotten these basic realities and is levying attacks aimed at debasing the campaign of the likely Democratic presidential nominee. What indeed has happened to this former progressive stalwart?