So Geraldine Ferraro has resigned from the Clinton campaign after claiming that, "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".
Keith Olbermann has responded to Senator Clinton's "disasterously tepid" response to "the cheap... ignorant... vile... racism that underlies every syllable...". Watch it! It is important. But leaving the important aside, I'd like to consider Ferraro's counter-factual claim.
She's wrong. Suppose a slender woman had stood up and made the same speech as Obama at the 2004 Democratic Party convention, saying there was not a red America and a blue America there was only the United States of America, and suppose she too had been a well spoken, Harvard educated, community organiser from South Chicago, with great judgement on the Iraq war and excellent political nerve, who had been brought up single handed lets say by a white American father after her Kenyan mother had been killed in a car crash. Well, by now she would have been truely annointed as the Democratic Party candidate and Hillary would be nowhere.
But there would have to be one other condition. This is the attribute Obama has which is indeed so unfair. She would have to be nearly as tall as him.
It's the tall who rule the world. They look down on the rest of us as, well, shorties. One study apparently showed that four out of five US presidential contests in the 20th century were won by the taller candidate. Yes, they have more than the upper hand.
To prove my case, as we are into counter-factuals, imagine if the same convention speech that launched Obama to national prominance had been made by him with no difference to his background except that he had been a Napoleonic 5 foot or less, striving to reach the microphone. Of course, he would not now be the candidate with the most delegates. He probably would not even be in the Senate.
I wrote that a Ms Obama would only have to be "nearly" as tall as the man himself to gain the same advantage. As we are at it, this is another profound inequity that America needs to solve. All over the world women have an unfair advantage. I am a mere five foot six and a half. That half is important! My partner is the same hight. But it is OK for her, she is tall enough for a woman - I, however, am short! Inch for inch women have the better over men.
But there is yet another big problem about heightism. Maybe it is a good thing that the tall get the best jobs and tend to rule the world. It hurts me to say it, I don't like blaming the victims, but look at the evidence. I had been refusing to face up to it all my life, but I could no longer do so after I met John Bolton in New York when he was representing the USA at the United Nations. Talk about Napoleonic, he came up to my chest! He must have made sure he had high chairs and low camera angles when he went on TV. Then I recalled that Chaney was not so tall and that Rumsfeld had been a bantam weight boxer. True, George Bush was over 6 foot but then I learnt that in his exceptionally tall (and therefore unfairly powerful) family he was known as "shorty"!
Of course hight is relative. In the US, tall really is tall. But so far as that great country is concerned it seems to be the case that it is better goverened by the tall than by the short. So maybe Obama's very unfair hight advantage is a good thing after all, even if he wouldn't be where he is today without it.
