Clinton role in health program disputed

By Susan Milligan, Globe Staff  |  March 14, 2008

WASHINGTON - Hillary Clinton, who has frequently described herself on the campaign trail as playing a pivotal role in forging a children's health insurance plan, had little to do with crafting the landmark legislation or ushering it through Congress, according to several lawmakers, staffers, and healthcare advocates involved in the issue.

In campaign speeches, Clinton describes the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, as an initiative "I helped to start." Addressing Iowa voters in November, Clinton said, "in 1997, I joined forces with members of Congress and we passed the State Children's Health Insurance Program." Clinton regularly cites the number of children in each state who are covered by the program, and mothers of sick children have appeared at Clinton campaign rallies to thank her.

But the Clinton White House, while supportive of the idea of expanding children's health, fought the first SCHIP effort, spearheaded by Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, because of fears that it would derail a bigger budget bill. And several current and former lawmakers and staff said Hillary Clinton had no role in helping to write the congressional legislation, which grew out of a similar program approved in Massachusetts in 1996.

"The White House wasn't for it. We really roughed them up" in trying to get it approved over the Clinton administration's objections, Hatch said in an interview. "She may have done some advocacy [privately] over at the White House, but I'm not aware of it."

"I do like her," Hatch said of Hillary Clinton. "We all care about children. But does she deserve credit for SCHIP? No - Teddy does, but she doesn't."

Neera Tanden, policy director for the Clinton campaign, said that the senator had "always been pushing for SCHIP" and that the White House had opposed the 1997 Hatch-Kennedy amendment to create the program because President Clinton had made a deal with the then-GOP leadership not to back any amendments to a contentious budget bill. The SCHIP plan - which provides federal matching grants to help states' uninsured children - was to be paid for with a hefty tobacco tax, an idea many Republican and tobacco-state lawmakers opposed.

Chris Jennings, who was a Clinton healthcare adviser during her years as the wife of a president, said Clinton had been a longtime and tireless advocate for expanding children's healthcare, and Jennings was baffled by suggestions that she had not been instrumental in getting the plan approved. Jennings noted that SCHIP was indeed adopted, in a second attempt, that same year.

"She was very proactive. At every step of the way, she was always pushing" for the concept of expanding healthcare for children, Jennings said.

Tanden, the campaign official, suggested that politics were at play in the criticism of Clinton. She noted that Kennedy and others had earlier been complimentary of Clinton's role in SCHIP, but have been more critical since lawmakers started taking sides in the Democratic presidential primary.

"Obviously, some things have changed between last fall and now. Some people have endorsed other candidates," Tanden said.

Kennedy has endorsed Obama, a move that deeply upset the Clinton campaign. Hatch initially endorsed Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination, then switched to Senator John McCain of Arizona after Romney left the race. Hatch, a longtime Kennedy friend, said he didn't want to criticize Clinton, but felt that the record should be set straight about how the SCHIP program was developed.

Asked whether Clinton was exaggerating her role in creating SCHIP, Kennedy, stopped in the hallway as he was entering the chamber to vote, half-shrugged.

"Facts are stubborn things," he said, declining to criticize Clinton directly. "I think we ought to stay with the facts."

Many members of Congress said they believe Hillary Clinton has a deep and sincere commitment to children's health issues. She has sponsored numerous bills and amendments dealing with a plethora of healthcare matters.

But privately, some lawmakers and staff members are fuming over what they see as Clinton's exaggeration of her role in developing SCHIP, including her campaign ads claiming she "helped create" the program. The irritation has grown since Nov. 1, when Clinton - along with fellow senators and presidential candidates Barack Obama, Chris Dodd, and John McCain - missed a Senate vote to extend the SCHIP program, which was approved without the votes of those lawmakers.

Kennedy said he patterned the SCHIP plan on a similar program Massachusetts had approved in 1996. Kennedy's account was backed up by two Bay State healthcare advocates who met with Kennedy in Boston to discuss the possibility of taking the idea nationwide: Dr. Barry Zuckerman, director of pediatrics at Boston Medical Center, and John McDonough, then a Democratic state legislator and now the executive director of Health Care for All, a healthcare advocacy group.

Kennedy, Zuckerman said in an interview, was intrigued by the idea of using a cigarette tax to pay for children's health, but worried he would not be able to get it through Congress. "I said, 'Times have changed,' and he ran with it," Zuckerman said.

McDonough, a Democrat who has not endorsed a presidential candidate, also said it was Kennedy who developed the SCHIP idea after that meeting. "I don't recall any signs of Mrs. Clinton's engagement," McDonough said. "I'm sure she was behind the scenes, engaged in lobbying, but it is demonstrably not the case" that she was driving the effort, he said.

After meeting Zuckerman and McDonough, Kennedy sought out Hatch, and the two worked on the bill together, offering it as an amendment to a budget resolution. But President Clinton - much to the surprise and anger of Kennedy - lobbied Democratic lawmakers to oppose the Hatch-Kennedy amendment, the lawmakers and staff members said.

Gene Sperling, a former chief economic adviser in the Clinton White House, said the budget resolution never would have passed the House with the Hatch-Kennedy amendment in it. He said that both the president and his wife wanted the SCHIP program and that Hillary Clinton lobbied hard to get it included in subsequent legislation.

In fact, the SCHIP program was approved later in the year, a feat Sperling said would not have been possible without the White House negotiating with GOP leaders. And lawmakers in both parties acknowledge that administration support was needed and appreciated. But they said the effort was largely driven by Hatch, Kennedy, and others in Congress.

"It was a bipartisan bill. I don't remember the role of the White House," said Representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat who has not endorsed a candidate in the presidential race and who was the chief Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which deals with health matters. "It did not originate at the White House." 

KEITH OLBERMANN: Finally, as promised, a special comment on the presidential campaign of the junior senator from New York. By way of necessary preface, President and Senator Clinton and the senator's mother and the senator's brother were of immeasurable support to me at the moments when these very commentaries were the focus of the most surprise, the most uncertainty and the most anger. My gratitude to them is unbiding.

Also, I am not here endorsing Senator Obama`s nomination, nor suggesting in it is inevitable. Thus I have fought with myself over whether or not to say anything. Events insist.

Senator, as it has reached its apex in their tone deaf, arrogant and insensitive reaction to the remarks of Geraldine Ferraro, your own advisers are slowly killing your chances to become president. Senator, their words and your own are now slowly killing the chances for any Democrat to become president. In your tepid response to this Ferraro disaster, you may sincerely think you disenthralling an enchanted media and righting an unfair advance bestowed on Senator Obama. You may think the matter has closed with Representative Ferraro's bitter, almost threatening resignation letter.

But, in fact, senator, you are now campaigning as if Barack Obama were the Democrat and you were the Republican. As Shakespeare wrote, senator, "that way madness lies." You have missed a critical opportunity to do what was right. No matter what Miss Ferraro now claims, no one took her comments out of context. She had made them on at least there separate occasions, then twice more on television this morning. Just hours ago, on "NBC Nightly News," she denied she had made the remark in an interview, only at a paid political speech.

In fact, the first time she spoke them was 10 days before that California newspaper published them, not in a speech, but in a radio interview. On February 26, quoting, "if Barack Obama were a white man, would we be talking about this as a potential real problem for Hillary. If he were a woman of any color, would he be in this position that he's in? Absolutely not."

The content was inescapable. Two minutes earlier, a member of Senator Clinton's finance committee, one of her Hill-Raisers had bemoaned the change in allegiance by super delegate John Lewis from Clinton to Obama and also the endorsement of Obama by Senator Dodd; "I look at these guys doing it," she had said, "and I have to tell you, it`s the guys sticking together."

A minute after the color remark, she was describing herself as having been chosen for the 1984 Democratic ticket purely as a woman politician, purely to make history. She was, in turn, making a blind accusation of sexism and dismissing Senator Obama`s candidacy as nothing more than some equal opportunity stunt.

The next day, she repeated her comments and a reporter from the newspaper in Torrence, California heard them; "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. 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."

And when this despicable statement, ugly in its overtones, laughable in its week grip of the facts, and moronic in the historical context, when it floats outward from the Clinton campaign like a poison cloud, what do the advisers have their candidate do? Do they have Senator Clinton herself compare the remark to Al Campanis (ph) talking on "Nightline" on Jackie Robinson Day about how blacks lack the necessities to become baseball executives, while she points out that Barack Obama has not gotten his 1600 delegates as part of some kind of affirmative action plan?

Do they have Senator Clinton note that her own brief period in elected office is as irrelevant to the issue of judgment as is Senator Obama's, while she points out that FDR had served only six years as governor and state senator before he became president? Or that Teddy Roosevelt had four and a half years before the White House? Or that Woodrow Wilson had two years and six weeks?

Or Richard Nixon 14? And Calvin Coolidge 25?

Do these advisers have Senator Clinton invoke Samantha Power, gone by sunrise after she used the word monster, and have Senator Clinton say, this is how I police my campaign, and this is what I stand for, while she fires former Congresswoman Ferraro from any role in the campaign? No, somebody tells her that simply disagreeing with, then rejecting the remarks is sufficient. She should then call regrettable words that should make any Democrat retch.

And that she should then try to twist them, first into some pox on both your houses plea to stick to the issues, and then to let her campaign manager try to bend them beyond all recognition into Senator Obama's fault. And thus these advisers give Congresswoman Ferraro nearly a week in which to send Senator Clinton`s campaign back into the vocabulary of David Duke; "anytime anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says, let`s address reality and the problems we're facing in this world, you`re accused of being racist, so you have to shut up. Racism works in two different directions. I really think they are attacking me because I'm white. How's that?"

How's that? Apart from sounding exactly like Rush Limbaugh attacking the black football quarterback Donovan McNab, apart from sounding exactly like what Miss Ferraro said about another campaign nearly 20 years ago, quote, "President Reagan suggested Tuesday that people don't ask Jesse Jackson tough questions because of his race. Former Representative Geraldine A. Ferraro said Wednesday that because of his, quote, radical views, if Jesse Jackson were not black, he would not be in the race."

So apart from sounding like insidious racism that is at least two decades old, apart from rendering ridiculous Senator Clinton`s shell game about choosing Obama as vice president, apart from this evenings resignation letter; "I am stepping down from your finance committee so I can speak for myself and you can continue to speak for yourself about what is at stake in this campaign. The Obama campaign is attacking me to hurt you."

Apart from all that, well, it sounds as if those advisers wanted their campaign to be associated with those words, and the cheap, ignorant, vile racism that underlies every syllable of them, and that Geraldine Ferraro has just gone freelance.

Senator Clinton, that is not a campaign strategy. This is a suicide pact. This week alone, your so-called strategists have declared that Senator Obama has not yet crossed some commander in chief threshold, but he might still be your choice to be vice president, even though a quarter of
the previous 16 vice presidents have become commander in chief during the greatest kind of crisis this country can face, a midterm succession, but you only pick him if he crosses that threshold by the time of the convention.

But if he does cross that threshold by the time of the convention, he will only have done so sufficiently enough to become vice president, not president? Senator, if the serpentine logic of your so-called advisers were not bad enough, now thanks to Geraldine Ferraro and your campaigns initial refusal to break with her, and your new relationship with her, now more disturbing still with her claim that she can now speak for herself about her vision as Senator Obama as some kind of embodiment of a quota if she wishes.

If you were to seek Obama as a vice president, it would be to Miss Ferraro some called of social engineering gesture, some kind of racial make good. Do you not see, senator?

To Senator Clinton`s supporters, to her admirers, to her friends for whom she is first choice and to her friends for whom she is second choice, she is still letting herself be perceived as standing next to and standing by racial divisiveness and blindness. Worse yet, after what President Clinton said during the South Carolina primary, comparing the Obama and Jesse Jackson campaigns, a disturbing but only border line remark, after what some in the black community have perceived as a racial undertone to the 3:00 a.m. ad, a disturbing but only borderline interpretation, and after the moments hesitation in her own answer on "60 Minutes" about Obama's religion, a disturbing but only borderline vagueness -- after those precedents, there are those who see a pattern. False or true, they see it. After those precedents, there are those who see an intent. False or true, they see it. After those precedents, there are those that see the Clinton campaign`s anything but benign neglect of the Ferraro catastrophe, falsely or truly, as a desire to hear the kind of casual prejudice which still haunts the society voiced, and to not distance the campaign from it.

To not distance you from it, Senator. To not distance you from that which you, as a woman, and Senator Obama, as an African-American, should both know and feel with the deepest of personal pain, which you should both fight with all you have, which you should both ensure has no place in this contest ever.

This, Senator Clinton, is your campaign and it is your name. Grab the reigns back from whoever has led you to this precipice before it is too late. Voluntarily or inadvertently, you are still awash in this filth. Your only reaction has been to disagree, reject, to call it regrettable. Her only reaction has been to brand herself as the victim and resign from your committee and insist she will continue to speak. Unless, senator, you say something definitive, the former congresswoman is speaking with your
approval.

Color-coded Hillary Alerts

Posted March 11, 2008 | 07:12 PM (EST)

If anyone has paid acutely painful attention to the political ministrations of Karl Rove over the past two and a half decades, it's me. And if there is anyone qualified to make comparisons between democracy's Darth Vader and Hillary Clinton, I stand at the head of that line, as well. And sadly, the similarities are so brutally obvious as to be disturbing.

First, there is this matter of her husband, a man I admired as president in spite of his teenage behavior. Sen. Barack Obama has run a campaign that has never mentioned race. In fact, ethnicity was not an issue until President William Jefferson Clinton made his comparisons of Obama in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson. We were on the verge of almost transcending such superficial nonsense until Mr. Clinton brought us back to 1968.

Senator Clinton plays the innocent on most of this by refusing to denounce these pronunciations. When she had the opportunity on 60 Minutes to tell the world that it is nonsense for the fear mongers to suggest Obama is a Muslim, she demurred with a qualified, "as far as I know" he's not. But she does know. Sen. Clinton and Obama have attended numerous Capital Hill prayer breakfasts together. Does she think he was playing the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, perhaps trying to see what is going on with that whole Christianity thing? Isn't any person believable when they declare their faith until they have been vetted by the Clinton campaign?

She saved her campaign in Texas by acting like George W. Bush drunk on the ideas of Karl Rove. The 3 a.m. call ad that used fear to drive voters in her direction was nothing more than a desperate politician's attempt to tell everyone not even duct tape will save them if they vote for Obama. Created by Roy Spence of Austin, the ad was first deployed in 1984 in the Mondale campaign. (His ad agency also gave us, "You are now free to move around the country," and, "Don't mess with Texas," as memorable slogans.)

As Karl Rove has proven and as Orlando Patterson pointed out in the New York Times, campaigns and their messages are often more about image than substance. Was it an oversight or a design that the children sleeping safely in that 3 a.m. ad were white? Isn't everyone in politics astute enough to know these days that everyone who needs protecting isn't white? When Bush was running for president, Rove never let him be photographed without a rainbow coalition of children. Are we supposed to believe that Hillary's minders didn't see the racism implicit in her phone call ad?

The Clinton campaign doesn't seem to understand that the depth of Obama's appeal comes from his willingness to look forward with optimism instead of over his shoulder in fear. When he says, "We need to talk to our friends, but we also need to talk to our enemies," he is speaking for every mother and father who has a son in Iraq or one who might end up toting a gun for an amorphous cause that few can any longer explain. Who doesn't want to know why we are so despised that people will strap bombs to themselves to blow us up? Oh, I forgot, they hate our freedom. That's one Sen. Clinton hasn't tried yet.

It is also obscene in the extreme for the Clinton campaign to compare Sen. Obama to Ken Starr. Many voters from the rocky coast of Maine to the sunny shores of California want to know how much money the senator and the former president are earning, to whom he is speaking for large sums, and how he paid for his library in Little Rock. Do the Clintons really want to remind us what Ken Starr was looking for? As a friend of mine has suggested, this utter lack of judgment to bring his name back into the public discourse is "breathtaking."

Clinton is unwilling to sully her own hands with these absurd references. Like Rove, she relies on surrogates to go out and fire the gun. After the targets are wounded or dead, Rove had his clients come in and call for gun control and explain how they admired the political victim. Not Senator Clinton. She does nothing to denounce the nastiness. By pretending Obama is not prepared to lead, she proves her own desperation to acquire power and she denigrates the remaining historical reputation of her husband's administration. Historians might look beyond this dust devil she has spun, but the general public won't be able to see through the dirt flying through the air.

We are all tired of this. We all have Bush-Clinton fatigue. We need a hopeful, fresh start. Hillary might have made a fine president. But she has turned into an ugly campaigner.

This is not her time.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/colorcoded-hillary-alert_b_91035.html?view=print

Are Clinton's inept attack ads and faux-feminism enough? Can Obama learn to attack? Plus: American eroticism devolves to Barbie boobs and Botox.

By Camille Paglia

The boldness of that generation of women, who were facing obstacles and prejudices far greater than today's, makes me impatient with the reactionary whining one hears from establishment feminists, including Steinem, about the supposedly still-crippling pervasiveness of sexism. As an equity feminist, I demand equal opportunities for women, but I strongly oppose intrusive special protections for women, which I regard as counterproductive and infantilizing. (My gender philosophy is fully detailed in "No Law in the Arena" in "Vamps & Tramps.")

 

 

http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/03/12/red_phone/index1.html

Sinbad Unloads on Hillary Clinton

Finally, the Barack Obama campaign has found a big gun to help shoot down Hillary Rodham Clinton's self-proclaimed foreign policy experience. And he may be the wackiest gun of all: Sinbad, the actor, who has come out from under a rock to defend Obama in the war over foreign policy credentials.

Sinbad, along with singer Sheryl Crow, was on that 1996 trip to Bosnia that Clinton has described as a harrowing international experience that makes her tested and ready to answer a 3 a.m. phone call at the White House on day one, a claim for which she's taking much grief on the campaign trail.

Sinbad, performing in 2007 for shareholders of Wal-Mart. Hillary Rodham Clinton served on the board of Wal-Mart from 1986 to 1992. (Spencer Tirey -- The Associated Press)

Harrowing? Not that Sinbad recalls. He just remembers it being a USO tour to buck up the troops amid a much worse situation than he had imagined between the Bosnians and Serbs.

In an interview with the Sleuth Monday, he said the "scariest" part of the trip was wondering where he'd eat next. "I think the only 'red-phone' moment was: 'Do we eat here or at the next place.'"

Clinton, during a late December campaign appearance in Iowa, described a hair-raising corkscrew landing in war-torn Bosnia, a trip she took with her then-teenage daughter, Chelsea. "They said there might be sniper fire," Clinton said.

Threat of bullets? Sinbad doesn't remember that, either.

"I never felt that I was in a dangerous position. I never felt being in a sense of peril, or 'Oh, God, I hope I'm going to be OK when I get out of this helicopter or when I get out of his tank.'"

In her Iowa stump speech, Clinton also said, "We used to say in the White House that if a place is too dangerous, too small or too poor, send the First Lady."

Say what? As Sinbad put it: "What kind of president would say, 'Hey, man, I can't go 'cause I might get shot so I'm going to send my wife...oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you.'"

As you may have guessed by now, Sinbad isn't supporting Clinton for president. He's an Obama guy. All because of Clinton.

"What got me about Hillary was her attitude of entitlement, like he messed up her plan, like he had no reason to be there," Sinbad said. "I got angry. I actually got angry! I said, 'I will be for Obama like never before.'"

But he's less ticked off with the Clinton campaign than he is with Saturday Night Live for its Hillary-loving sketches that portray Obama as an unqualified nervous Nelly. What really bothers him is SNL's choice of actor (Fred Armisen) to play Obama.

"My problem is -- you couldn't just temporarily hire a black man to play Obama? You had to put a white man in a black face? You couldn't find a light-skinned brother to play Obama?"

The Clinton campaign doesn't seem amused by Sinbad's commentary or his recollection of the 1996 Bosnia trip as more depressing than harrowing.

Defending Clinton's characterization of her Bosnia mission, campaign spokesman Phil Singer kindly provided experts from news stories written about the trip at the time, including a Washington Post story from May 26, 1996, that said, "This trip to Bosnia marks the first time since Roosevelt that a first lady has voyaged to a potential combat zone."

Singer also cited a Kansas City Star article from September 2000 that quoted Sinbad as describing the situation in Bosnia as "so tense. It was Crips and Bloods." (And that's how Sinbad continued to characterize the situation in our interview Monday. He said, "At the time, we didn't realize how crazy it was between the Bosnians and the Serbs. I didn't realize how much hate was going on.")

Still, defending Clinton against Sinbad the refuter, Singer said, "The sad reality of what was going on in Bosnia at the time Senator Clinton traveled there as first lady has been well documented. It appears that Sinbad's experience in Bosnia goes back further than Senator Obama's does. In fact, has Senator Obama ever been to Bosnia?"

Ferraro: 'They're attacking me because I'm white'

• Story Highlights
• NEW: Geraldine Ferraro says she is being attacked because she is white
  
• She says Obama would not be a candidate if he were white
  
• Obama has called the comments "patently absurd"
  
• Clinton says she disagrees with Ferraro's comments
  

(CNN) -- Geraldine Ferraro defended her controversial comment that Sen. Barack Obama's campaign was successful because he was black, telling an interviewer Tuesday that she was being attacked because she was white.

"Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says, 'Let's address reality and the problems we're facing in this world,' you're accused of being racist, so you have to shut up," she told the Daily Breeze of Torrance, California. "Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?"

In another interview Tuesday, she compared Obama's situation to her own 24 years ago, when she was the first female candidate for vice president.

She told a FOX News interviewer, "I got up and the question was asked, 'Why do you think Barack Obama is in the place he is today" as the party's delegate front-runner?

"I said in large measure, because he is black. I said, Let me also say in 1984 -- and if I have said it once, I have said it 20, 60, 100 times -- in 1984, if my name was Gerard Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro, I would never have been the nominee for vice president," she said.

In her first interview with Daily Breeze, published late last week, Ferraro said, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman, 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."

She also said Hillary Clinton had been the victim of a "sexist media."

Obama himself has called the comments "patently absurd."

"I don't think Geraldine Ferraro's comments have any place in our politics or in the Democratic Party. They are divisive," he told the Allentown Morning News.

"I think anybody who understands the history of this country knows they are patently absurd. And I would expect that the same way those comments don't have a place in my campaign, they shouldn't have a place in Sen. Clinton's, either," he added.

Earlier, Obama's top strategist, David Axelrod, called for Clinton to sever ties with the former New York congresswoman, who serves on her campaign's finance committee.

"When you wink and nod at offensive statements, you're really sending a signal to your supporters that anything goes," Axelrod said.

Axelrod said the comment by Ferraro, coupled with Clinton's "own inexplicable unwillingness" to deny that Obama was a Muslim during a recent interview, was part of "an insidious pattern that needs to be addressed."

Ferraro could not be reached for comment.

Clinton told The Associated Press that she did not agree with Ferraro's comments.

"It is regrettable that any of our supporters on both sides, because we've both had that experience, say things that kind of veer off into the personal," she said. "We ought to keep this on the issues. There are differences between us. There are differences between our approaches on health care, on energy, on our experience, on our results that we've produced for people. That's what this campaign should be about."

The former congresswoman is the latest Clinton surrogate to launch a firestorm with comments that related to Obama's heritage or ethnicity.

Clinton's husband, former President Clinton, drew sharp criticism from black leaders for a series of comments he made before the South Carolina primary, including comparing Obama's campaign to the Rev. Jesse Jackson's 1984 run.

Former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, a major Clinton backer, said several times that an Obama presidency would improve the world's image of the U.S. because of the Illinois senator's Muslim roots.

Obama, however, said Kerrey's comments were intended to highlight Obama's Muslim heritage in voters' minds.

And shortly before the Texas primary, 84-year-old Clinton supporter Adelfa Callejo told CBS 11 News in Dallas, Texas, that Obama would have trouble attracting Latino support because he was African-American.

"When blacks had the numbers, they didn't do anything to support us," Callejo said. "They always used our numbers to fulfill their goals and objectives, but they never really supported us, and there's a lot of hard feelings about that. I don't think we're going to get over it anytime soon."

Last month, when Hillary Clinton was asked whether she would reject and denounce Callejo's remarks, she said, "People get to express their opinions," adding that "a lot of folks have said really unpleasant things about me over the course of this campaign."

Later, her campaign released a statement saying that she had been unaware of the substance of the remarks during that interview and both denounced and rejected them.

Obama has faced his own headaches. Foreign policy adviser Samantha Power ended her connection with his campaign last week after telling a Scottish interviewer that Clinton was a "monster."

As the only woman ever to be selected by a major political party for the position of vice president of the United States, Geraldine Ferraro is uniquely suited to comment on the political events of the day.

An outspoken advocate for women's issues and a staunch supporter of presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, Ferraro will offer her views on the state of the nation and the race for the White House at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Armstrong Theatre of the Torrance Cultural Arts Center Theatre in Torrance. The program is part of the American Perspectives series.

Speaking by phone from her New York law office, the 72-year-old former Democratic congresswoman outlined the themes that will dominate her talk. She also offered pointed observations

Former Democratic vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro will speak in Torrance Sunday.

"I will probably start with a personal account, drawing attention to the historic firsts of both these candidacies in our party, and point out specific, significant differences between Hillary's campaign and mine," said Ferraro.

"I will discuss what I think's been going on in her campaign and the role of the media, which has been far larger than anything I've seen before. And I'll get into what this bides for the future. I may also speak about the superdelegates, since I was involved with their creation."

Born in 1935, Ferraro was a teacher, a lawyer and member of the Queens County District Attorney's office prior to