Persons of Interest: Geraldine Ferraro
Before there was Sarah Palin, there was Geraldine Ferraro. In 1984 she emerged from obscurity to make history as the first woman to have her name placed on the ticket of a major political party in a presidential election, when she was selected as the running mate of Democratic Presidential candidate Walter Mondale.
Geraldine Ferraro was born on August 26, 1935 in Newburgh, New York, the daughter of Dominick and Antonetta Ferraro. Her mother was a first-generation Italian American and her father was an Italian immigrant who was the owner of two restaurants. Her father died as the result of a heart attack in May 1944, when Geraldine was eight years old. After her father's death, her mother moved the family to a low-income area of the South Bronx, working in the garment industry to support herself and her children.
Ferraro attended Marymount Academy in Tarrytown, New York, and was bright enough to skip the seventh grade. She was a member of the honor society, and was also active in sports. She graduated in 1952 and with her mother's support, she pursued her post-secondary education at Marymount Manhattan College while working as many as three jobs at the same time. During her senior year she met her future husband John Zaccaro, a Marine. Ferraro received her Bachelor of Arts in English in 1956, making her the first woman in her family to obtain a college degree. She also passed the city exam to become a licensed school teacher. Ferraro taught elementary school in Astoria, Queens. She was unhappy doing this and decided to attend law school. She later recalled that an admissions officer had said to her, "I hope you're serious, Gerry. You're taking a man's place, you know."
Ferraro graduated with a Juris Doctor degree with honors from Fordham University School of Law in 1960, going to classes at night while continuing to work as a second-grade teacher. She was one of only two women in her graduating class of 179 and was admitted to the bar of New York State in March 1961.
Ferraro married John Zaccaro on July 16, 1960. He became a realtor and businessman. The couple had three children, two daughters and a son (her middle child). While raising her children, Ferraro worked part-time as a civil lawyer in her husband's real estate firm. She became involved in local politics and she met lawyer and future Governor Mario Cuomo, who became her political mentor. In 1970, she was elected president of the Queens County Women's Bar Association.
In January 1974, she was appointed Assistant District Attorney for Queens County, New York by her cousin, District Attorney Nicholas Ferraro. She was assigned to the new Special Victims Bureau, which prosecuted cases involving rape, child abuse, spouse abuse, and domestic violence. Ferraro was named head of the unit in 1977. She gained a reputation for hard work and good judgement. Ferraro later learned that she was being paid less than equivalent male colleagues because she was a married woman. While considering a career change, Cuomo, then Secretary of State of New York, suggested that she run for the House of Representatives.
In 1978 Geraldine Ferraro ran for election to the U.S. House of Representatives from New York's 9th Congressional District in Queens and ran on the slogan "Finally, A Tough Democrat". She won the three-way primary with 53 percent of the vote, and then won in the general election as well, defeating her Republican opponent by a 10 percent margin. It was later discovered that she had financed her campaign in large part from a $110,000 loan from her husband, in violation of campaign finance laws. This transaction was declared illegal by the Federal Election Commission and she had to pay back the loans in October 1978, by way of several real estate transactions. In 1979, her campaign was fined $750 for violating the election law.
Ferraro was elected to be the Secretary of the House Democratic Caucus for 1981–1983 and again for 1983–1985, which in turn entitled her to a seat on the Steering and Policy Committee. In 1983, she was named to the House Budget Committee and she also served on the Public Works and Transportation Committee and the Post Office and Civil Service Committee. She was a cosponsor of the 1981 Economic Equity Act. She was also a member of a congressional delegation to Nicaragua in 1984, where she spoke to members of the Contras.
Ferraro served as one of the deputy chairs for the 1980 Carter-Mondale campaign and she served on the commission that rewrote the Democratic delegate selection rules in 1982, which included the creation of superdelegates. She was chosen as Chairwoman of the Platform Committee for the 1984 Democratic National Convention, the first woman to hold that position.
In the 1984 U.S. presidential election, as Walter Mondale became the likely Democratic nominee, he put forth the idea of picking a woman as his vice-presidential running mate. The idea had support from the National Organization for Women and the National Women's Political Caucus. Mondale selected Ferraro to be his running mate on July 12, 1984. The Mondale campaign hoped that her selection would be a "game change" as he was well behind incumbent Ronald Reagan at the time. Ferraro was the first woman to run on a major party national ticket in the United States as well as the first Italian American. In her acceptance speech, Ferraro said, "The daughter of an immigrant from Italy has been chosen to run for vice president in the new land my father came to love."
Ferraro gained a huge amount of media attention. At first, the focus was one the novelty of her being a female candidate. She was asked on Meet the Press, "Do you think that in any way the Soviets might be tempted to try to take advantage of you simply because you are a woman?"
The choice of Ferraro did not give Mondale the bump in the polls that he had hoped for. Following the announcement, polls showed that only 22 percent of women were excited about Ferraro's selection, while 18 percent thought it was a "bad idea". By the last week of July, things got worse as the New York Times began reporting about Ferraro's finances, the finances of her husband, John Zaccaro, and their separately filed tax returns. Ferraro promised to release both their returns within a month. The media also reported on the investigation into Ferraro's 1978 campaign funds. Zaccaro resisted releasing his financial information and on August 12, Ferraro announced that her husband would not in fact be releasing his tax returns, on the grounds that to do so would be harmful to his real estate business.
The announcement dominated television and newspapers and Ferraro faced a lot of questions about the issue. Some advised Mondale that Ferraro should leave the ticket. The Philadelphia Inquirer published reports of a possible link between Zaccaro and organized crime figures, but most publishers did not give the story any credence. This led to Zaccaro changing his mind and on August 20 he released his tax records. The disclosure included notice of payment of some $53,000 in back federal taxes that was owed due to what was described as an accountant's error. Ferraro said the statements proved overall that she had nothing to hide and that there had been no financial wrongdoing. But the disclosure that Ferraro and her husband were worth nearly $4 million, had a full-time maid, and owned a boat and the two vacation homes was spun against her to attack Ferraro's image of a rags-to-riches story.
Ferraro performed well at an August 22 press conference covering the final disclosure. She answered all questions for two hours, but by this time significant damage had been done.The issue killed any momentum the Mondale–Ferraro ticket gained out of the convention.
Ferraro was also attacked by representative of the Catholic Church because her position on abortion was at odds with that of her church. She was criticized by Cardinal John O'Connor, the Catholic Archbishop of New York, and James Timlin, the Bishop of Scranton, and she said "I do believe that there are a lot of Catholics who do not share the view of the Catholic Church".
Only one vice-presidential debate took place between Congresswoman Ferraro and Vice President George H. W. Bush, held on October 11, without a clear winner. During the debate she said to Bush, "Let me just say first of all, that I almost resent, Vice President Bush, your patronizing attitude that you have to teach me about foreign policy." Second Lady Barbara Bush was quoted as describing Ferraro as "that four-million-dollar—I can't say it, but it rhymes with 'rich'." Mrs. Bush later apologized for the remark.
On October 18 the New York Post accurately reported that her father had been arrested for possession of numbers slips in Newburgh shortly before his death. Ferraro's mother had never told her about his arrest. The story led Ferraro to state that Post publisher Rupert Murdoch "does not have the worth to wipe the dirt under [my mother's] shoes."
By the end of the campaign, Ferraro had traveled more than Mondale and more than Reagan and Bush combined. Mondale and Ferraro lost the general election in a landslide. They received only 41 percent of the popular vote compared to 59% for Reagan and Bush and in the Electoral College won only Mondale's home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. Reagan captured 55 percent of women voters according to exit polling. Political observers generally agree that no Democrat could have won the election in 1984 and Mondale later said that he had no regrets about choosing Ferraro.
After the election, the House Ethics Committee found that Ferraro had technically violated the Ethics in Government Act by failing to report, or reporting incorrectly, details of her family's finances, and that she should have reported her husband's holdings on her Congressional disclosure forms. The committee concluded that she had acted without "deceptive intent" and no action against her was taken.
Ferraro had relinquished her House seat to run for the vice-presidency. She appeared in a Diet Pepsi commercial in 1985 and she published Ferraro: My Story, an account of the campaign in November 1985. It was a best seller and earned her $1 million. She founded the Americans Concerned for Tomorrow political action committee, which focused on getting ten women candidates elected in the 1986 Congressional elections (eight of whom were successful). She considered running in the 1986 Senate election in New York against Republican incumbent Alfonse D'Amato, but in December 1985, she decided against it, due to an ongoing U.S. Justice Department probe on her and her husband's finances stemming from the 1984 campaign revelations.
In January of 1985 John Zaccaro pled guilty to fraudulently obtaining bank financing in a real estate transaction. He was sentenced to 150 hours of community service. In October 1986, he was indicted on unrelated felony charges regarding an alleged 1981 bribery of Queens Borough President Donald Manes concerning a cable television contract. A year later, he was acquitted of that charge at trial. Ferraro said her husband never would have been charged had she not run for vice president. In February 1986, the couple's son John had been arrested for possession and sale of cocaine. He was convicted, and in June 1988, sentenced to four months imprisonment. Asked in September 1987, whether she would have accepted the vice-presidential nomination had she known of all the family problems that would follow, she said, "More than once I have sat down and said to myself, oh, God, I wish I had never gone through with it."
Ferraro remained active in raising money for Democratic candidates nationwide, especially female candidates. She was a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics from 1988 to 1992, teaching seminars such as "So You Want to be President?" In October 1991, Ferraro ran for the Democratic nomination in the 1992 United States Senate election in New York. In a bitter campaign she lost the nomination by less than a percentage point. D'Amato won the election by a very narrow margin. Following the primary loss, Ferraro became a managing partner in the New York office of Keck, Mahin & Cate, a Chicago-based law firm.
President Bill Clinton appointed Ferraro as a member of the United States delegation to United Nations Commission on Human Rights in January 1993. She attended the June 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna as the alternate U.S. delegate. In October 1993, Clinton promoted her to be United States Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. She was named vice-chair of the U.S. delegation to the landmark September 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing Ferraro held the U.N. position until 1996.
In February 1996, Ferraro joined the CNN political talk show Crossfire as the co-host representing the "from the left" viewpoint. She sparred with her "from the right" co-host Pat Buchanan, and the show earned strong ratings. In early 1998 she left Crossfire and ran for the Democratic nomination again in the 1998 New York Senate election. One of her opponents, Congressman Chuck Schumer, outspent her by a five-to-one margin, and she lost to Schumer by a 51 percent to 26 percent margin. Schumer went on to decisively defeat D'Amato in the general election. The 1998 primary defeat brought an end to Ferraro's political career.
Ferraro complained of feeling unusually tired at the end of her second senate campaign. In November 1998, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer. She did not publicly disclose the illness until June 2001, when she went to Washington to successfully press in Congressional hearings for passage of the Hematological Cancer Research Investment and Education Act. Ferraro became a frequent speaker on the disease, and an avid supporter and honorary board member of the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation. She was initially given only three to five years to live, but several new drug therapies and a bone marrow transplant in 2005 helped her to manage the disease and live much longer than predicted.
In January 2000, Ferraro and Lynn Martin, a former Republican Congresswoman and U.S. Secretary of Labor, co-founded G&L Strategies, a management consulting firm. Its goal was to advise corporations on how to develop more women leaders and make their workplaces more amenable to female employees. She also became a principal in the government relations practice of the Blank Rome law firm in February 2007, working both in New York and Washington about two days a week in their lobbying and communications activities. Now over 70 years of age, she said that if she fully retired, she would "go nuts".
In December 2006, Ferraro announced her support for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. She assisted with fundraising by assuming an honorary post on the finance committee for Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. In March 2008 she said in an interview: "If Obama was a white man, 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." She received strong criticism for the remarks was was accused of racism by some Obama supporters. Clinton publicly expressed disagreement with Ferraro's remarks. Ferraro resigned from Clinton's finance committee on March 12, 2008, saying that she didn't want the Obama camp to use her comments to hurt Clinton's campaign. In April, Ferraro said people were deluging her with negative comments and trying to get her removed from one of the boards she was on. She added, "This has been the worst three weeks of my life." She said that she thought Obama had behaved in a sexist manner and that she might not vote for him.
During September 2008, Ferraro gained attention again following the selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, the first such major party bid for a woman since her own in 1984. In reaction to the nomination, Ferraro said, "It's great to be the first, but I don't want to be the only. And so now it is wonderful to see a woman on a national ticket."
Ferraro continued to battle her cancer, making repeated visits to hospitals. In March 2011 she went to Massachusetts General Hospital to receive treatment for pain caused by a fracture, a complication from her multiple myeloma. Once there, however, doctors discovered she had come down with pneumonia. Unable to return home, Ferraro died at Massachusetts General on March 26, 2011.
President Obama said upon her death that "Geraldine will forever be remembered as a trailblazer who broke down barriers for women, and Americans of all backgrounds and walks of life," and said that his own two daughters would grow up in a more equal country because of what Ferraro had done.
Geraldine Ferraro was born on August 26, 1935 in Newburgh, New York, the daughter of Dominick and Antonetta Ferraro. Her mother was a first-generation Italian American and her father was an Italian immigrant who was the owner of two restaurants. Her father died as the result of a heart attack in May 1944, when Geraldine was eight years old. After her father's death, her mother moved the family to a low-income area of the South Bronx, working in the garment industry to support herself and her children.
Ferraro attended Marymount Academy in Tarrytown, New York, and was bright enough to skip the seventh grade. She was a member of the honor society, and was also active in sports. She graduated in 1952 and with her mother's support, she pursued her post-secondary education at Marymount Manhattan College while working as many as three jobs at the same time. During her senior year she met her future husband John Zaccaro, a Marine. Ferraro received her Bachelor of Arts in English in 1956, making her the first woman in her family to obtain a college degree. She also passed the city exam to become a licensed school teacher. Ferraro taught elementary school in Astoria, Queens. She was unhappy doing this and decided to attend law school. She later recalled that an admissions officer had said to her, "I hope you're serious, Gerry. You're taking a man's place, you know."
Ferraro graduated with a Juris Doctor degree with honors from Fordham University School of Law in 1960, going to classes at night while continuing to work as a second-grade teacher. She was one of only two women in her graduating class of 179 and was admitted to the bar of New York State in March 1961.
Ferraro married John Zaccaro on July 16, 1960. He became a realtor and businessman. The couple had three children, two daughters and a son (her middle child). While raising her children, Ferraro worked part-time as a civil lawyer in her husband's real estate firm. She became involved in local politics and she met lawyer and future Governor Mario Cuomo, who became her political mentor. In 1970, she was elected president of the Queens County Women's Bar Association.
In January 1974, she was appointed Assistant District Attorney for Queens County, New York by her cousin, District Attorney Nicholas Ferraro. She was assigned to the new Special Victims Bureau, which prosecuted cases involving rape, child abuse, spouse abuse, and domestic violence. Ferraro was named head of the unit in 1977. She gained a reputation for hard work and good judgement. Ferraro later learned that she was being paid less than equivalent male colleagues because she was a married woman. While considering a career change, Cuomo, then Secretary of State of New York, suggested that she run for the House of Representatives.
In 1978 Geraldine Ferraro ran for election to the U.S. House of Representatives from New York's 9th Congressional District in Queens and ran on the slogan "Finally, A Tough Democrat". She won the three-way primary with 53 percent of the vote, and then won in the general election as well, defeating her Republican opponent by a 10 percent margin. It was later discovered that she had financed her campaign in large part from a $110,000 loan from her husband, in violation of campaign finance laws. This transaction was declared illegal by the Federal Election Commission and she had to pay back the loans in October 1978, by way of several real estate transactions. In 1979, her campaign was fined $750 for violating the election law.
Ferraro was elected to be the Secretary of the House Democratic Caucus for 1981–1983 and again for 1983–1985, which in turn entitled her to a seat on the Steering and Policy Committee. In 1983, she was named to the House Budget Committee and she also served on the Public Works and Transportation Committee and the Post Office and Civil Service Committee. She was a cosponsor of the 1981 Economic Equity Act. She was also a member of a congressional delegation to Nicaragua in 1984, where she spoke to members of the Contras.
Ferraro served as one of the deputy chairs for the 1980 Carter-Mondale campaign and she served on the commission that rewrote the Democratic delegate selection rules in 1982, which included the creation of superdelegates. She was chosen as Chairwoman of the Platform Committee for the 1984 Democratic National Convention, the first woman to hold that position.
In the 1984 U.S. presidential election, as Walter Mondale became the likely Democratic nominee, he put forth the idea of picking a woman as his vice-presidential running mate. The idea had support from the National Organization for Women and the National Women's Political Caucus. Mondale selected Ferraro to be his running mate on July 12, 1984. The Mondale campaign hoped that her selection would be a "game change" as he was well behind incumbent Ronald Reagan at the time. Ferraro was the first woman to run on a major party national ticket in the United States as well as the first Italian American. In her acceptance speech, Ferraro said, "The daughter of an immigrant from Italy has been chosen to run for vice president in the new land my father came to love."
Ferraro gained a huge amount of media attention. At first, the focus was one the novelty of her being a female candidate. She was asked on Meet the Press, "Do you think that in any way the Soviets might be tempted to try to take advantage of you simply because you are a woman?"
The choice of Ferraro did not give Mondale the bump in the polls that he had hoped for. Following the announcement, polls showed that only 22 percent of women were excited about Ferraro's selection, while 18 percent thought it was a "bad idea". By the last week of July, things got worse as the New York Times began reporting about Ferraro's finances, the finances of her husband, John Zaccaro, and their separately filed tax returns. Ferraro promised to release both their returns within a month. The media also reported on the investigation into Ferraro's 1978 campaign funds. Zaccaro resisted releasing his financial information and on August 12, Ferraro announced that her husband would not in fact be releasing his tax returns, on the grounds that to do so would be harmful to his real estate business.
The announcement dominated television and newspapers and Ferraro faced a lot of questions about the issue. Some advised Mondale that Ferraro should leave the ticket. The Philadelphia Inquirer published reports of a possible link between Zaccaro and organized crime figures, but most publishers did not give the story any credence. This led to Zaccaro changing his mind and on August 20 he released his tax records. The disclosure included notice of payment of some $53,000 in back federal taxes that was owed due to what was described as an accountant's error. Ferraro said the statements proved overall that she had nothing to hide and that there had been no financial wrongdoing. But the disclosure that Ferraro and her husband were worth nearly $4 million, had a full-time maid, and owned a boat and the two vacation homes was spun against her to attack Ferraro's image of a rags-to-riches story.
Ferraro performed well at an August 22 press conference covering the final disclosure. She answered all questions for two hours, but by this time significant damage had been done.The issue killed any momentum the Mondale–Ferraro ticket gained out of the convention.
Ferraro was also attacked by representative of the Catholic Church because her position on abortion was at odds with that of her church. She was criticized by Cardinal John O'Connor, the Catholic Archbishop of New York, and James Timlin, the Bishop of Scranton, and she said "I do believe that there are a lot of Catholics who do not share the view of the Catholic Church".
Only one vice-presidential debate took place between Congresswoman Ferraro and Vice President George H. W. Bush, held on October 11, without a clear winner. During the debate she said to Bush, "Let me just say first of all, that I almost resent, Vice President Bush, your patronizing attitude that you have to teach me about foreign policy." Second Lady Barbara Bush was quoted as describing Ferraro as "that four-million-dollar—I can't say it, but it rhymes with 'rich'." Mrs. Bush later apologized for the remark.
On October 18 the New York Post accurately reported that her father had been arrested for possession of numbers slips in Newburgh shortly before his death. Ferraro's mother had never told her about his arrest. The story led Ferraro to state that Post publisher Rupert Murdoch "does not have the worth to wipe the dirt under [my mother's] shoes."
By the end of the campaign, Ferraro had traveled more than Mondale and more than Reagan and Bush combined. Mondale and Ferraro lost the general election in a landslide. They received only 41 percent of the popular vote compared to 59% for Reagan and Bush and in the Electoral College won only Mondale's home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. Reagan captured 55 percent of women voters according to exit polling. Political observers generally agree that no Democrat could have won the election in 1984 and Mondale later said that he had no regrets about choosing Ferraro.
After the election, the House Ethics Committee found that Ferraro had technically violated the Ethics in Government Act by failing to report, or reporting incorrectly, details of her family's finances, and that she should have reported her husband's holdings on her Congressional disclosure forms. The committee concluded that she had acted without "deceptive intent" and no action against her was taken.
Ferraro had relinquished her House seat to run for the vice-presidency. She appeared in a Diet Pepsi commercial in 1985 and she published Ferraro: My Story, an account of the campaign in November 1985. It was a best seller and earned her $1 million. She founded the Americans Concerned for Tomorrow political action committee, which focused on getting ten women candidates elected in the 1986 Congressional elections (eight of whom were successful). She considered running in the 1986 Senate election in New York against Republican incumbent Alfonse D'Amato, but in December 1985, she decided against it, due to an ongoing U.S. Justice Department probe on her and her husband's finances stemming from the 1984 campaign revelations.
In January of 1985 John Zaccaro pled guilty to fraudulently obtaining bank financing in a real estate transaction. He was sentenced to 150 hours of community service. In October 1986, he was indicted on unrelated felony charges regarding an alleged 1981 bribery of Queens Borough President Donald Manes concerning a cable television contract. A year later, he was acquitted of that charge at trial. Ferraro said her husband never would have been charged had she not run for vice president. In February 1986, the couple's son John had been arrested for possession and sale of cocaine. He was convicted, and in June 1988, sentenced to four months imprisonment. Asked in September 1987, whether she would have accepted the vice-presidential nomination had she known of all the family problems that would follow, she said, "More than once I have sat down and said to myself, oh, God, I wish I had never gone through with it."
Ferraro remained active in raising money for Democratic candidates nationwide, especially female candidates. She was a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics from 1988 to 1992, teaching seminars such as "So You Want to be President?" In October 1991, Ferraro ran for the Democratic nomination in the 1992 United States Senate election in New York. In a bitter campaign she lost the nomination by less than a percentage point. D'Amato won the election by a very narrow margin. Following the primary loss, Ferraro became a managing partner in the New York office of Keck, Mahin & Cate, a Chicago-based law firm.
President Bill Clinton appointed Ferraro as a member of the United States delegation to United Nations Commission on Human Rights in January 1993. She attended the June 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna as the alternate U.S. delegate. In October 1993, Clinton promoted her to be United States Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. She was named vice-chair of the U.S. delegation to the landmark September 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing Ferraro held the U.N. position until 1996.
In February 1996, Ferraro joined the CNN political talk show Crossfire as the co-host representing the "from the left" viewpoint. She sparred with her "from the right" co-host Pat Buchanan, and the show earned strong ratings. In early 1998 she left Crossfire and ran for the Democratic nomination again in the 1998 New York Senate election. One of her opponents, Congressman Chuck Schumer, outspent her by a five-to-one margin, and she lost to Schumer by a 51 percent to 26 percent margin. Schumer went on to decisively defeat D'Amato in the general election. The 1998 primary defeat brought an end to Ferraro's political career.
Ferraro complained of feeling unusually tired at the end of her second senate campaign. In November 1998, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer. She did not publicly disclose the illness until June 2001, when she went to Washington to successfully press in Congressional hearings for passage of the Hematological Cancer Research Investment and Education Act. Ferraro became a frequent speaker on the disease, and an avid supporter and honorary board member of the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation. She was initially given only three to five years to live, but several new drug therapies and a bone marrow transplant in 2005 helped her to manage the disease and live much longer than predicted.
In January 2000, Ferraro and Lynn Martin, a former Republican Congresswoman and U.S. Secretary of Labor, co-founded G&L Strategies, a management consulting firm. Its goal was to advise corporations on how to develop more women leaders and make their workplaces more amenable to female employees. She also became a principal in the government relations practice of the Blank Rome law firm in February 2007, working both in New York and Washington about two days a week in their lobbying and communications activities. Now over 70 years of age, she said that if she fully retired, she would "go nuts".
In December 2006, Ferraro announced her support for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. She assisted with fundraising by assuming an honorary post on the finance committee for Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. In March 2008 she said in an interview: "If Obama was a white man, 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." She received strong criticism for the remarks was was accused of racism by some Obama supporters. Clinton publicly expressed disagreement with Ferraro's remarks. Ferraro resigned from Clinton's finance committee on March 12, 2008, saying that she didn't want the Obama camp to use her comments to hurt Clinton's campaign. In April, Ferraro said people were deluging her with negative comments and trying to get her removed from one of the boards she was on. She added, "This has been the worst three weeks of my life." She said that she thought Obama had behaved in a sexist manner and that she might not vote for him.
During September 2008, Ferraro gained attention again following the selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, the first such major party bid for a woman since her own in 1984. In reaction to the nomination, Ferraro said, "It's great to be the first, but I don't want to be the only. And so now it is wonderful to see a woman on a national ticket."
Ferraro continued to battle her cancer, making repeated visits to hospitals. In March 2011 she went to Massachusetts General Hospital to receive treatment for pain caused by a fracture, a complication from her multiple myeloma. Once there, however, doctors discovered she had come down with pneumonia. Unable to return home, Ferraro died at Massachusetts General on March 26, 2011.
President Obama said upon her death that "Geraldine will forever be remembered as a trailblazer who broke down barriers for women, and Americans of all backgrounds and walks of life," and said that his own two daughters would grow up in a more equal country because of what Ferraro had done.