By Kathleen
LA Times Obituaries reports that Geraldine Farraro, who was the first woman to break the political glass ceiling for high office when she ran with Walter Mondale as the 1984 Democratic nominee for vice president, died earlier today at Massachusetts General Hospital. She was seventy-five years old.
Like Sarah Palin, Ms Ferraro was relatively unknown to the public when she was launched into the limelight at the Democratic convention in 1984. As Ms Ferraro was the first woman to run for such high office she was recognised as the original "trail blazer" in furthering the cause of women in politics, long before Sarah Palin came on the political scene. However, she was not selected purely because she was a woman. She was also chosen because of her strong working class, Italian Roman Catholic background which was a demographic that it was thought that Mondale might have problems appealing to.
Ms Ferraro was an intelligent woman and the online World Encyclopedia of Biography reveals that she was an excellent student who won a full scholarship at the age of sixteen to Marymount Manhattan College and later studied law at Fordham University's evening law classes. She served three terms in the U.S House of Representatives and after the election worked on behalf of female Democratic candidates in New York as well as pushing for more government spending and more federal programmes for the underprivileged.
Today Sarah Palin through the cold and impersonal medium of facebook and twitter offered her condolences to Ms Ferraro's family. Palin could have sent a sincere and unobserved card or asked RAM to do so on her behalf but why pass up on the chance of drawing more attention to herself? After all it is quite clear that Palin has very "excited expectation that someday that final glass ceiling would be shattered by the election of a woman president."
I wonder who it is that Palin has in mind for the honour?
Twitter, Facebook, and now on Fox News: Geraldine Ferraro's death made Sarah Palin "even more inspired to serve the public good." You don't say, Sarah!
