Harold Ford 'Stonewalled' Into Withdrawing?

On the New York Times op-ed page and on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Tuesday, Harold Ford Jr., did what many New Yorkers feared he would do if elected to Kirsten Gillibrand's U.S. Senate seat: he made the weaker appear the stronger cause. He prevaricated. He dissembled. He put the best face on an embarrassing situation -- an important skill for a politician, but this particular politician was seeking to explain not why he was running, but why he was not running a race he nevertheless insists he could have won.

It's pretty well known by now that Ford, erstwhile U.S. representative from Tennessee, seriously considered challenging Gillibrand in New York's Democratic primary for the Senate seat she currently occupies, the seat vacated by Hillary Clinton when she became secretary of state. (The ever-bumbling Gov. David Paterson named Gillibrand to the seat after a protracted and awkward vetting period during which -- bizarrely -- Caroline Kennedy seemed to be the front-runner.) And by Tuesday morning, everyone who cared knew that Ford had taken himself out of the running; Ford wrote an op-ed piece in Tuesday's Times under the headline "Why I'm Not Running for the Senate."


In it, and on Scarborough's show, Ford gave his official reason for withdrawing, which was predictable in the extreme: his challenge to Gillibrand could only make for an ugly primary, leaving the New York Democratic Party -- in the wake of Ford's certain victory, of course -- weakened and vulnerable to defeat by a Republican challenger. The Democratic Party can't afford to lose yet another Senate seat, and so forth and so on.

Scratch Ford's magnanimous surface, however, and you find a thick coating of paranoia -- which doesn't, of course, mean that they're not out to get him. "Democratic Party insiders started their own campaign to bully me out of the race," says Ford in his editorial. "[T]he party bosses who tried to intimidate me...are the same people responsible for putting Democratic control of the Senate at risk." He has a point, of course: Harry Reid and Charles Schumer, both of whom openly opposed Ford's candidacy, don't exactly inspire confidence as we approach the 2010 elections. Less convincing, however, is Ford's insistence to Scarborough that "this talk that the liberals didn't accept me is just wrong." Guess what? The liberals didn't accept him.

New York One reports that Ford met last Saturday with African-American leaders and that they were "lukewarm at best." In his Tuesday utterances, Ford tried to position himself as a populist whose heart is with the working-class voter, but the Times implies that the independents didn't exactly accept him, either: Ford "told the Times that he had visited Staten Island via helicopter, apparently unaware that residents of the borough are preoccupied with the dearth of public transportation there."

To be sure, New Yorkers are hard to fool, whether they're from Staten Island, Brooklyn, the Bronx or the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But it seems to me that the inhabitants of Chelsea had more to do with Ford's leaving the race than he's letting on.

Both New York One and DNAinfo report that Ford was raked over the Q-and-A coals during a visit to the Stonewall Democratic Club last week. Members of the primarily gay and unquestionably liberal organization hissed, booed and heckled Ford, reminding him that he had, while a Tennessee congressman, twice supported an amendment to the Constitution that would ban same-sex marriage; and while Ford denies it, Stonewall Democrats further accused Ford of telling Tennessee gay activists that he would oppose the amendment, only to support it when push came to shove.

In video footage of the meeting, Ford -- often referred to as "photogenic," "telegenic," even "Obamaesque"-- faces down the hecklers with a smile that is more than half grimace. But what was he expecting? Polite applause and genteel dissent? We're living in an age when senior senators are shouted down by Tea Party activists and when the President of the United States is heckled by a member of Congress.

Ford can only have been shaken by the encounter, and must have been further shaken by his less than enthusiastic reception by African-American politicos. He almost certainly feels ill-used, but he should know better than to take gay and lesbian support for granted. Ford can be as sanctimonious as he likes about maintaining party unity and keeping control of a safe Senate seat, but it seems to me he's trying to save face. What he encountered in Chelsea last week was nothing less than an exercise in rough-and-ready participatory democracy, and he must have come away from it thinking that New York politics was not the cakewalk -- or the tea dance -- he expected it to be.