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It has been said that politicians usually get in trouble when they say what they truly think. Geraldine Ferraro is no exception. She is in trouble after her ill-advised comments that Barack Obama is somehow the beneficiary of a political quota system that gave him a leg up in the process.

"If Obama was a white man," she said, "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."

In the firestorm that followed, Ms. Ferraro, defended herself by claiming that her words were twisted and taken out of context. Unfortunately, like Jimmy the Greek's famous gaffe about Black athletes years ago, Geraldine's comments were self-destructive, no matter what the context. A reality nowadays is that negative race-related comments are the "third rail" of American politics; touch that rail and you are zapped. (To be sure, Democrats normally get a pass in this area, but the media may have been feeling little embarrassed about their failure to damage John McCain with 'The New York Times' hit piece on McCain's relationship with a lobbyist, so they had hammer Geraldine to maintain a semblance of balance.)

Ms. Ferraro forgot the old adage that one should keep one's words soft and sweet in the likely event that one has to eat them later. Her words were served back to her in a rather unpalatable fashion when Obama, glib and urbane as usual, retorted that being an African American by the name Obama is not best formula for success in American politics.

Democrats have been looking forward to the upcoming presidential race since their recapture of Congress in 2006. They regarded Hillary Clinton as a sort of "Bill Lite" and figured she was a slam dunk and their ticket to return to business as usual - a sort of nostalgic return to the 90's. Then up popped Obama, a charismatic crowd pleaser, who captured the imagination of a large section of the party with his own nostalgic return to the Kennedy years of the 60's, where all Kennedy had to do was stand around and look good. Most telling was Ted Kennedy's enthusiastic endorsement of Obama, which pried open the current fissure in the Democrat Party. Suddenly, the juggernaut that was once the political machine of Bill and Hillary sputtered and halted as Obama won caucuses and primaries and more delegates than Hillary.

Geraldine Ferraro, part of Hillary's fund-raising network, is somewhat of an anachronism herself.

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