Say this about Harold Ford Sr.: The former 9th
District congressman hasn’t lost his appetite for political combat. He made that
clear last week when he accepted co-billing with his son Harold Ford Jr.,
at a Friday-morning rally at the Park Place headquarters of the current
congressman, now a candidate for the U.S. Senate.
A “reception” for the two Harold Fords, it was called, and
it drew a goodly crowd. With some time to kill, the senior Ford shared some
thinking about his son’s campaign as he awaited the arrival of Rep. Ford’s
campaign bus. (Yes, if earlier that morning you were watching home-town idol
Justin Timberlake on ABC-TV’s Good Morning America, that was the
selfsame bus that had just happened to have pulled up behind the stage, flashing
its Ford-For-Senate logo before the eyes of the nation.)
Nor has the old warrior lost his sense of strategy. It was
clearly a mistake, the former congressman said, for his son’s Senate rival,
Republican nominee Bob Corker, to have invited President Bush to
Memphis for a fundraiser next week – the second such occasion in Tennessee,
following a public embrace between the two week before last in Nashville.
“That’s the trouble with those millionaires. They don’t’
want to spend any money, especially none of their own,” Ford Sr., a seven-figure
type himself these days as a well-paid Florida-based consultant, said of the
former Chattanooga mayor, an entrepreneur whose considerable fortune had derived
from low-income housing projects.
As the elder Ford explained it, Corker’s misplaced
frugality was making him over-dependent on a president with sagging polls and
presumably frayed coattails. As a piece of analysis, it made sense. It was
certainly true that his son’s campaign seemed to be spending more money than his
rival’s just now – mainly on a recurring and well-made series of TV ads that
made the most of the younger Ford’s mediagenic looks and reassuring stage
presence.
Those commercials – the most recent one made in a church! –
featured the same right-of-center rap (pro-Patriot Act, pro-curbs on
immigration, etc.) that has driven the left wing of the congressman’s party
bananas. One effect of this approach has seemingly been to prevent Corker,
fearful of being out-flanked on h is right, from coming to the political center
as newly minted party nominees usually do.
The audience for Rep. Ford’s typically rousing and
generalized remarks at the Friday morning rally, billed as a “reception for
volunteers,” had included a generous collection of Democrats –
senior citizens, business types, mid-Town Democrats, suburban types, etc., etc.
Subsequent to the event, the impression got out in some
quarters that it had been an affair for College Democrats (it wasn’t – though
they, like other Democrats, had been invited and responded) in which, according
to a widely circulated email from a University of Memphis student: “Apparently,
after Junior was done speaking, his fucktard brother got a chance to speak to
the volunteer base that we acquired for Junior.”
Hearsay of this sort begat
further hearsay, and soon an honest blogger or two had picked up on a gathering
outrage among supporters of 9th District Democratic nominee Steve
Cohen that the “fucktard brother” (i.e., independent congressional candidate
Jake Ford) had benefited from what had now, in some tellings, become a
“handoff” at the rally from Rep. Ford.
Actually, nothing of the sort
occurred. Jake Ford had been no more than one member of the large and milling
crowd. He had no role in the proceedings, which ended after his congressman
brother left to go join the Rev. Ben Hooks for the dedication of a
Whitehaven Job Corps center in Hooks’ honor.
If Jake Ford “worked the crowd”
afterward (as a revised version of the ever-shifting story had it), then so did
anybody else who had been in the throng. It was just a case of a large gathering
breaking off into isolated conversational clumps as people made their way out
the door.
That so much was later made of a
non-event merely served to underscore the existence of a very real schism in
local Democratic ranks – one that was bound to be exacerbated by Jake Ford’s own
claim in a radio interview this week.
Asked by a caller on a show
hosted by Jennings Bernard why Rep. Ford had not publicly endorsed
him, Jake Ford maintained that his brother had in fact done so and, to further
that contention, availed himself of the same rumors that were already in play
concerning last week’s Friday-morning rally.
“Quite simply, he [Rep. Ford] endorses me every day,” said
congressional candidate Ford. “I endorse him every day.” As for why his
brother hadn’t “officially come out,” Ford said, “I think most people should
realize he does endorse me. I was just with him on Friday at his campaign
headquarters for a rally. Make no mistake about it, he’s my brother, and I love
the guy. It’s just two different races. He’s running for the Senate, and I’m
running for Congress.”
The bottom line was that now people were prepared to
believe what they wanted to believe. When Jake Ford’s radio remarks are
carefully parsed, they don’t authenticate the fact of an “endorsement” that,
ultimately, could only come from Rep. Ford himself. But they certainly put Rep.
Ford in the position of having to speak to the issue himself – something he
ultimately will be under great– perhaps unavoidable — pressure to do.
Understandably, proponents of state Senator Cohen are vexed
at Rep. Ford for the statements of neutrality he has made so far concerning the
race to succeed him as representative from the 9th District. They,
too, tend to regard the congressman’s posture as indicative of de facto support
for brother Jake.
In the long run, some believe, that feeling could grow in
Democratic circles, even at the statewide level, and cost Rep. Ford enough votes
at the margin to threaten his own chances in the Senate race. Right now, with
Corker running like a dry creek and losing momentum in all the polls to Ford, it
may not seem so to the congressman.
And his ex-congressman father has made no secret of his
intention to pull out all the stops for both of his sons.
-Meanwhile, state Senator Cohen continues to be
regarded as the frontrunner. He, after all, is his party’s nominee, made what
has to be regarded as a substantial primary showing in black precincts (17
percent overall), is regarded by many Democrats, especially liberal ones, as a
long-time champion of their causes, and even has admirers in Republican circles.
That last fact, based on some isolated conservative
positions (e.g., on gun control and the death penalty), as well as a general
admiration for his legislative service and tenacity, is cause for some concern
in the camp of Republican nominee Mark White, who has devoted much
attention in his own campaign to social issues like abortion and gay marriage.
It is areas like those where he perceives Cohen to have possible weaknesses.
In an address to the College Democrats at the University of
Memphis Monday night, Cohen maintained that “both of my opponents” hoped to
undermine him in such areas. He defended his opposition to constitutional
amendments against gay marriage — jesting, however, that he was firmly opposed
to “inter-galactic” marriage.
Cohen told the College Democrats that Jake Ford in his
radio appearance had implied he was a homosexual, a racist, and “a crook”. In
all fairness, the first two allegations derived more from innuendoes and more
from callers than from anything Ford said. But candidate Ford did seem to be
doing his best to nudge home the latter charge.
“I think he’s stepped over the line a couple of times, and
we still cannot get the Attorney General to be responsive to some of the
allegations that we have become aware of pertaining to some dealings that he has
had himself.” Ford had said on Bernard’s show without elaborating further.
The very fact that he said something like that was taken by
many Cohen supporters as ample confirmation that Jake Ford was intimately bound
up with the appearance of a new Web site called “Crooked Cohen.com,” which makes
the very unspecified allegations alluded to by Ford. Blogger Derek Haire
(rivercitymud.com) painstakingly traced that site and Jake Ford’s own campaign
site back to the same IP address.
-No sign, by the way, of Ophelia Ford,
unseen on the campaign trail during this entire season but still, for
demographic and party reasons, the favorite in the District 29 state Senate race
over the relentlessly campaigning Republican Terry Roland.