The Ford Conundrum
Before being eclipsed by Barack Obama, Ford was the African-American politician most likely to break into the national mainsteam. Elected to the House at age 26, selected as the Democrats’ keynote speaker four years later, a plausible Senate candidate in 2002, the most conservative member of the Congressional Black Caucus as he prepared for his 2006 Senate campaign, Ford seemed like a good bet to become the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction. Instead, in a great Democratic year, he came up just short, victimized by his state’s drift to the far right, the Republicans’ nominating their most electable candidate, and one of the more blatantly racist campaign ads in recent memory.
Given his defeat, if Ford was to have a career in statewide elective politics, it would have to come in a state other than Tennessee. Why not New York, then, given the state’s tradition (Hillary Clinton, Bobby Kennedy, even Daniel Patrick Moynihan) of electing people without real (or any) connections to the state? It seems rather unlikely. The Observer’s Steve Kornacki has labeled the candidacy “Ford’s impossible dream,” and suggested that the move “smells a little of career desperation and a lot of misguided political calculation” for the figure whose political career was once so promising.”
The reaction to Ford thus far centered on views that seem far out of the mainstream for a New York Democratic primary. (He supported amending the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage; he implied he would back congressional legislation to outlaw abortion.) And unfortunately for Ford, his natural base (African-Americans) overlaps with the minority of New York Democrats who oppose gay marriage and abortion, so he would seem to have little opportunity to expand his support.
Even if Ford were a better ideological fit for New York Democrats, however, his chances of victory would be remote. The appropriate comparison for Ford isn’t Clinton or RFK but James Buckley or Bill Brock. Buckley and Brock both were officeholders in one state who, after losing in their home states, moved and ran for office someplace else. In a great Republican year, Buckley lost by 13 points to Chris Dodd in 1980; in another great Republican year, Brock lost by 18 points to Paul Sarbanes in 1994. Since the onset of popular elections for the U.S. Senate, no one elected to office in one state has been elected senator from another state.
In the last 100 years, only one person has been elected to Congress from two different states—Ed Foreman, who spent one term in the House from a west Texas district, and then one term from a southern New Mexico district. In the process, as the clip below suggests, he alienated LBJ, which contributed to his 1964 loss. To borrow from Lloyd Bentsen, I suspect that Harold Ford is no Ed Foreman.
PRESIDENT JOHNSON: That was a good vote you had today.
SPEAKER MCCORMACK: Yes, it was very good. 414 to nothing; one present. What’d the Senate do?
PRESIDENT JOHNSON: 88 to 2. Morse and Gruening.
MCCORMACK: I don’t understand Gruening.
PRESIDENT JOHNSON: Oh, he’s no good. He’s worse than Morse. He’s just no good. I’ve spent millions on him up in Alaska [in reconstruction funds after the March 1964 Alaska earthquake]. He’s just no good.
And Morse is just as undependable and erratic as he can be.
MCCORMACK: I know that. But I can’t understand the other fellow.
PRESIDENT JOHNSON: Say, I wanted to point out this little shitass [Ed] Foreman today got up and said that we [Johnson] acted impulsively by announcing that we had an answer on the way [to the Tonkin Gulf incidents] before the planes dropped their bombs.
[Break.]
PRESIDENT JOHNSON: It’s just a pure lie, and smokescreen.
MCCORMACK: But he was booed two or three times. Tremendous booing on the Democratic side. He was—everybody knew he was just cheap and mean and contemptible. Well, you know what he is.
PRESIDENT JOHNSON: Yeah. Yeah, he’s no good.