For Geraldine Ferraro: Obama’s popularity is a black and white issue.

Former member of the U.S. House of Representatives and the first and only woman to date to represent a major U.S. political party as a candidate for Vice President, Geraldine Ferraro, wins today’s jab de jour award–and the Obama brigade was quickly and conveniently offended.

It’s the latest in this season’s pathetic and potentially politically fatal Democrat party donnybrook between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

The scenario is all too familiar for these rarely candid and always calculated candidates: First you hit hard. Have your aide or spokesperson hurl the next stone, say something silly, annoying, or insulting (or better yet, all three…).

Then you immediately and with complete mock sincerity fein shock and dismay. Following that up with your official and unwavering vow to never, ever, ever, let such a thing happen again. Which you back up by publicly firing the offending party while your opponent’s campaign cries bloody murder from the highest mountain.

It is the political equivalent of watching the Imperial Russian Ballet perform. Each step so precise. Each movement so well rehearsed and planned by both troupes.

Ferraro officially entered the frey with her thus far unapologetic remarks made in a recent interview published by a California newspaper. Ferraro, a Clinton campaign member, suggested that Barack Obama wouldn’t be where he is in his campaign today if Obama were a white man or a woman of any color.

Release the hounds… The reaction has largely been, as you might expect with this race, black and white… That of universal offense, outrage, and anger… Immediately followed by cries and catterwalls for Ferraro to be publicly flogged, fileted, and eventually forgotten–after of course, all of the political juice has been squeezed from the rather milquetoast remarks.

Also not unexpectedly, Obama responded that the remarks were divisive and “patently absurd,” while Clinton shrugged the remarks off as regrettable, personal, and unfortunate.

In the words of Linda Ellerbee, one of my favorite broadcasters of all time: “And so it goes…”

If you are John McCain or a McCain supporter, you have to be lapping this stuff up with a very large kitchen spoon. Think about it, you have Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama beating each other over the head daily, almost hourly, with ridiculous rhetoric and rapid-fire and equally repellent “response,” while simultaneously spending every dollar they can to do it. To borrow a phrase from horse racing, if you’re McCain you have to be secretly thinking, “Go Baby Go!”

But some will be quick to defend Ferraro’s largely irrelevant political and personal insight. And understandably so. Ferraro knows quite a lot about being a pastel political icon. After all, when Ferraro was Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984, the Mondale/Ferraro ticket lost in an embarrasing landslide. So perhaps she knows of what she speaks about Obama.

In this case, no. Ferraro is, in fact, wrong. Dead wrong.

She is utterly and unquestionably wrong because any other fresh-faced, smooth-talking, and pathetically pandering politician would, in fact, also easily enjoy the same rapid rise to prominence that Barack Obama is currently experiencing.

Historically, the Democrat base has proven time after time that they are always ready and willing to be led by any person or party preaching their favorite collective Democrat hymn: O’ Promise Me (that the government will take care of me).

And the choir, in this case, is singing along at the top of their lungs and swaying to and fro with their hands raised high in the air.

As of this evening, Ferraro has refused to back off her remarks and has, instead, sought to elaborate and validate. So the story will have legs for the foreseeable future–at least until the next staffer steps up and places their tongue in fast-forward and their head on the proverbial political chopping block.

And to think we only have six more months of this until the Democrat convention. Then the feuding and fussing really begins–and the mainstream media has their notebooks, cameras, and recorders at the ready.