National Affairs
No longer allowed to state the obvious
Claire Hoy
In his weekend announcement that he was now a candidate to become the mayor of Vancouver, city councilor Raymond Louie played his own race card.

The Vancouver-born son of Chinese immigrants, the 43-year-old Louie would be the city's first Chinese- Canadian mayor and he thinks that's a real plus. "Me being Chinese happens to be a circumstance I obviously find myself in," he said, speaking at his opening campaign speech at a Chinese restaurant, "but I would say it's a positive thing and I think I can bring that experience, being from an ethnic community, to the equation..."

At last reports, none of his opponents - or for that matter, anybody else - is jumping up and down and hurling accusations at Louie that he is somehow trying to divide voters along racial lines.

Nor should they. Al Louie has done is state the obvious. He is Chinese. So are many Vancouver voters. And there is an argument to be made that his life experiences working in his parents bakery and growing up as part of an ethnic minority - which not that long ago was treated rather shabbily by Canada's mainstream culture - would bring a different perspective to city hall.

All of which, of course, brings us to the phony outrage launched in the U.S. by Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Barrack Obama and his supporters against the 1984 Democratic vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, currently a supporter of Obama's opponent Senator Hillary Clinton.

This is the same Obama who for years - until it recently became a public controversy - has remained silent while his minister, a man Obama described as his "spiritual mentor," preached a fiery brand of anti-white, anti- American paranoia to his huge Chicago congregation, going so far as to buying into the 9/11 conspiracy theory that it was all set up by the Bush administration.

As you likely know, Ferraro gave an interview to a small California newspaper and had the audacity to say that, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if 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 with the concept."

This doesn't mean - and Ferraro certainly didn't imply it - that Obama's only political asset is the color of his skin. Far from it.

Anybody who has watched this man give a speech knows how good he is on his feet.

Yet it seems absolutely obvious that a rookie, white male senator would not have been chosen to give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention and that a white candidate would not have received 91 pr cent of the black vote in the Mississippi primary last week, just as it is equally obvious, as Ferraro herself says, she would not have been chosen on Walter Mondale's 1984 presidential ticket had she not been a woman.

"In 1984 if my name had been Gerald Ferraro, not Geraldine, I would never have gotten nominated," she said.

Her gender, she argues, wasn't her only asset. She was qualified for the job, as is Obama, but so were many other more tradition, i.e. white male, candidates. The deal breaker was he gender, plain and simple.

She says the same thing is true of Obama's candidacy. "Why is his candidacy historic? Can you give me another reason why it is an historic campaign? Why are we afraid to say this? I am absolutely stunned by this whole thing. I'm not saying he isn't qualified, never did I say that. ..."

Yet, because of the politically staged uproar, Ferraro stepped down from Clinton's finance committee and Clinton herself felt compelled to apologize. Apologize for what, pray tell? That would be akin to Clinton who, quite legitimately, uses her gender his the same way that Obama has legitimately used his race to argue that her election would also be "historic."

And it would. In Clinton's case, she'd be the first female president. In Obama's case, he'd be the first black president. They both campaign openly on these truths, seeing them as a political positive, so how does it become "racist" when somebody such as Ferraro - who is not a racist, and everybody knows it - makes the same point?

This whole controversy over Ferraro's comments is yet another example of a world in which we're no longer allowed to state the obvious without it being twisted for selfish reasons and turned completely upside down.

All you have to do is scream "racist" or "sexist" and hat ends the debate. In the meantime, those who are overtly touting their race and/or sex to their own advantage go merrily along on their way to glory.