Tonight, as promised, Keith Olbermann attacked Senator Hillary Clinton in a ten-minute "Special Comment," saying that he was not endorsing Barack Obama but that "events insist" that he speak and stand against her "tepid response" to the controversial remarks of Geraldine Ferraro wherein she said that Obama wouldn't have been as successful if he were not black. Last night Olbermann decried the statements as "clearly racist"; tonight, he followed up with a doozy in which he accused her of "campaigning as if Barack Obama were the Democrat and you were the Republican." In so doing, said Olbermann — in letting the opportunity to forcefully oppose Ferraro's comments pass her by — Olbermann said that Clinton had "missed a critical opportunity to do what was right."




Geraldine Ferraro has stood by her comments and denied that they were racist, saying on "NBC Nightly News" tonight that they were response to a specific question about why this election was special, and saying that it was the Obama campaign that was playing "this type of a race card." (See related video here.)

Olbermann chose to frame his comment in terms of bad choices on the part of Senator Clinton, stopping short of calling her inherently racist, instead casting the matter in terms of her receiving bad advice from the "tone deaf" and "arrogant" members of her campaign ("they are killing your chances of becoming president...[and] slowly killing the chances for any democrat to become president"). He characterized Ferraro's remarks as "a blind accusation of sexism and dismissing Senator Obama's campaign as some equal opportunity stunt," and decried her comments both in this instance and historically, pointing to the "cheap, ignorant vile racism that underlines them."

He also blamed her advisers for not pushing her to repudiate those comments immediately — unlike the remark by Obama advisor Samantha Power, who had called Clinton a "monster" and who was "gone by sunrise" from the Obama campaign. Olbermann specifically fingered (but did not name) Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams, saying that instead of repudiating Ferraro's words — "words that should make any Democrat retch" — she was instead "letting her campaign manager bend them beyond all recognition into Sentaor Obama's fault...thus giving Ferraro nearly a week to [send the dialogue] back into the vocabulary of David Duke."

"Do you not see, Senator?" Olbermann asked. "Senator Clinton, this is not a campaign strategy. This is a suicide pact."...

(See KO's rant here.)