Hillary Supporters Should Want to Complete Ferraro’s Unfinished Business [View all]

[DonViejo]

Last edited Wed Feb 12, 2014, 10:19 AM - Edit history (1)

This OP is posted to the Hillary Clinton Group

Jill Lawrence

A new documentary film on the first woman on a White House ticket is full of emotions Clinton should tap for 2016. They could help her make history.

A new documentary about Geraldine Ferraro is so stirring that it should be adopted by fans of Hillary Clinton as their go-to motivational movie. If she runs for president, Clinton will certainly need a message beyond “Elect me, I’m a woman.” But as the film shows, history is powerful. Framing her candidacy as part of a continuing journey toward equality for women could help Clinton neutralize potential negatives like her age, establishment ties, and also-ran status.

Clinton is a key figure in Geraldine Ferraro: Paving the Way, which chronicles Ferraro’s life and pioneering role as the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1984. She’s the one who articulates the sense of “unfinished business” that suffuses the film and is much on Ferraro’s mind toward the end of her life.

“I hope you have your tissues,” former secretary of state Madeleine Albright told a VIP-studded, largely female audience last week at a screening in Washington. It was good advice. To her credit, director Donna Vaccaro, Ferraro’s daughter, did not ignore controversies and setbacks in her mother’s career. But the thrust of the film, airing March 21 on Showtime as part of Women’s History Month, is uplifting: Ferraro’s push against the boundaries of her time, the emotion and exuberance of her rise from poverty to the apex of politics, and her faith in Clinton to finish the work of the founding mothers.

“She was going to do what I couldn’t do,” Ferraro tells Vaccaro in an interview in the year before her 2011 death from blood cancer. She says she felt Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton beside her as she cast her ballot for Clinton in the 2008 primary, then breaks down and asks for the camera to stop. Later, tears dried, she completes her thought: “I felt that the work that had been done for over 100 years could reach fruition. It was the first time I cried when I voted.”

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/12/hillary-supporters-should-want-to-complete-ferraro-s-unfinished-business.html