Ferraro on ABC: 'We’ll Be Looking' to Monitor Sexist Palin Coverage

ABC’s Good Morning America interviewed 1984 vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro in the 7:30 half hour on Wednesday, asking her about how Palin will handle the pressure of her speech. Robin Roberts tried to get Ferraro, a Hillary supporter, to condemn a video of Palin in a Newsweek interview suggesting Hillary Clinton’s “perceived whining” is not a help to women candidates.

Ferraro did lament it briefly, but went on to warn the media: “A lot of those PUMA [Party Unity My A--] people and I will be watching very carefully to make sure that you treat her just like anybody else. Go to her, her qualifications, go to her experience. Go to whatever you want to. But make sure it's done on a basis where she's treated like a guy by the media. No sexism. Because we'll be looking.”

The Palin video is an interview from March by Newsweek's Karen Breslau. If I was picking clips from that session, it might be this exchange:  

PALIN: The other issue is a challenge I think, that someone tried to make for me—again not so much gender-oriented perhaps—but, would I be able to do the job with having kids? I've got a bunch of kids and how would that balance be. And my answer would always be … that I'm going to do the job just as well as any male governor who had kids, you know, I think we can handle this.

BRESLAU: Did voters ask you that when you were out campaigning for your first job?

PALIN: Amazingly, some Neanderthals did.

Today, it's liberal feminists and the liberal media who are strangely play-acting the "Neanderthal" role. In the middle of her Ferraro interview, Roberts offered praise for Palin before the request for Palin-trashing arrived:

ROBERTS: She illuminates a lot of the strengths of, of John McCain being a maverick and being a reformer some things that people have forgotten. Now, there is one thing that Governor Palin said when -- concerning Hillary Clinton, and remember all of the thought that there was sexism and what was covered and how the press was dealing with that.

FERRARO: I'm one of those people who complained bitterly about that.

ROBERTS: Right and the article with "Newsweek," Sarah Palin talked about how maybe it was Hillary Clinton did a disservice to herself by bringing that up. I want to get your reaction to this.

PALIN (VIDEO CLIP): When I hear a statement like that coming from a woman candidate with any kind of perceived whine about that excess criticism, or, you know, maybe a sharper microscope put on her, I think that, that doesn't do us any good.

FERRARO: You know that, that, was a complaint that we heard from a lot of women. But to be quite frank, it wasn't Hillary who was complaining. It was us. It was, it was me and several others. In fact if you take a look at the Hillary Clinton voters, there are some people there who are called PUMA....Those are the women who turned around and said that the sexism in the press was so bad during the primaries and they're furious at the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean, and Barack Obama for not speaking up against this. And they say there's this double standard. If racist -- if the media had approached Barack Obama in a racist way, everybody would have been screaming and rightly so. With Hillary, not so. And one of the things I mentioned earler when I was on, on GMA, was I said, you know, there was a guy sitting there with a sign saying "iron my shirts." Why didn't the media report that? Does that not indicate that there is sexism in this country? [Actually, quite a few media outlets picked it up.]

Had somebody been there with a sign for Barack Obama that said shine my shoes, would there not have been a reporting of that? No double standard. No double standard. And there are those PUMA people are those people who say "we're not going to vote for Barack Obama. We're going to vote for John McCain. Or we're going to write in Hillary, or what we're going to do is we're not going to do anything on the top line." Those, some of those people, maybe John McCain will pick up. But, you know, it is, it is a very bad place to be. And I have to tell you, even Governor Palin thinks that's whining. A lot of those PUMA people and I will be watching very carefully to make sure that you treat her just like anybody else. Go to her, her qualifications, go to her experience. Go to whatever you want to. But make sure it's done on a basis where she's treated like a guy by the media. No sexism. Because we'll be looking.