Barack Obama’s campaign is calling on Hillary Clinton to fire Geraldine Ferraro after she credited the Illinois senator’s stunning rise to his race.

Ferraro, the former Congresswoman and Democratic nominee for Vice President in 1984, sits on Hillary Clinton’s finance committee and is a supporter who has served as a surrogate speaker on the New York Senator’s behalf.

Today, she said that: “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.”

Geraldine Ferraro said Hillary Clinton had suffered because the press “has been uniquely hard on her. It’s been a very sexist media. Some just don’t like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign.”

This Democratic race is getting uglier by the day, and Hillary’s half-assed reactions to incendiary remarks about Obama are telling.

Perhaps she should both reject and denounce them!

Obama’s top strategist, David Axelrod, told reporters that the comments are part of an “insidious pattern that needs to be addressed… When you wink and nod at offensive statements you are really sending a signal that anything goes.”

Barack Obama later condemned the Geraldine Ferraro remarks himself.

“I don’t think Geraldine Ferraro’s comments have any place in our politics or in the Democratic Party. They are divisive,” he told the Allentown Morning News. “I think anybody who understands the history of this country knows they are patently absurd. And I would expect that the same way those comments don’t have a place in my campaign, they shouldn’t have a place in Senator Clinton’s, either.”

Another Obama advisor, Susan Rice, told MSNBC the comments were “outrageous and offensive” and worse than those of Samantha Power, the Barack Obama staffer who quit last week after branding Clinton a “monster.”

Hillary Clinton later said she did not agree with Ferraro’s comments.

“It is regrettable that any of our supporters on both sides, because we’ve both had that experience, say things that kind of veer off into the personal,” she said.

“We ought to keep this on the issues. There are differences between us. There are differences between our approaches on health care, on energy, on our experience, on our results that we’ve produced for people.”

“That’s what this campaign should be about.”

Ferraro is the latest Clinton surrogate to launch a firestorm with comments that related to Barack Obama’s heritage or ethnicity - a group that includes none other than Bubba himself, former President Bill Clinton, who drew sharp criticism for a series of comments he made before the South Carolina primary in January, including comparing Obama’s campaign to the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 run.

Former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, a Clinton supporter, said several times that an Obama presidency would improve the world’s image of the U.S. because of his Muslim roots - thought by some to be a thinly-veiled scare tactic.

One thing looks increasingly certain - we don’t expect Obama to accept the #2 spot on a Democratic ticket should this historic race come to that.

Democratic voters, meanwhile, headed into the Mississippi primary, their final ballot clash before the contest in Pennsylvania April 22.