Harold Ford Selfish Party Hack

(Ford isn’t even a partisan loyalist, he really is only concerned with having a position IN the establishment).

We all know politicians (and even their families) have monstrous egos. From the average do-gooder running for local office, up to the presidential races, all the entrants believe that they can do the job — or even worse are running for office for the publicity (Al Sharpton, Carol Mosely-Braun, Ron Paul, Mike Gravel).

My all time favorite is Alan Keyes, who has run for president in 1992, 1996, 2000 and 2008 as well as been a Republican nominee for senate (in various states) in 1988, 1992, and 2004.
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Harold Ford ended up accomplishing very little by his run at the United States Senate run. Rather than improving his stature by gradually moving positions, and perhaps extracting favors from a wide variety of sources (specifically the Whitehouse). Ford actually allowed Gillibrand the space to both seem more liberal, and more credibly liberal than she had been as an upstate congresswoman.

In fact, the big winner was Gillibrand who actually increased her Democratic Party strength in New York.

Update I: Harold Ford actually also managed to make himself look quite foolish by admonishing Democrats yet not really coming up with any solutions.

I’m surprised this came so soon, but the NYtimes is reporting that Harold Ford is out of the New York Senate race.

Here’s the NYtimes article.

I don’t think anyone thought Ford was actually going to run …
1.) He had a free-hosted blog as his campaign web site.
2.) He had a bunch of weird responses to his tax filings.
3.) He kept flip flopping on basic issues.

Previously I wrote about Harold Ford here.

Harold Ford is trying to go on offense after being beaten up about his lack of New York tax returns and big Merill Lynch money (when it seems like he does very very little for Merrill Lynch, given he was working for MSNBC and working as an adjunct professor / fellow or something). [...]

In 2006, Harold Ford was about 50,000 votes short ( 50.71% to 47.99%) of capturing a Senate seat in Tennessee.

Less than four years later Ford is now gunning for Kristen Gillibrand’s Senate seat — in NEW YORK. (Queue the Pace Picante Sauce outrage )

Gillibrand is shifting her positions to deal with the transition from a conservative district to a more liberal federal position, and Ford is doing the same thing — moving from relatively more conservative Tennessee to more liberal New York.

I think there is a common string between Harold Ford’s repositioning for a Senate race and Angela McGlowan’s jump into the Mississippi congressional race — the political-lobbyist complex.  As opposed to retreating into the private or non-profit sector in an attempt to accomplish stated political goals, these two essentially cash in as lobbyists and “analysts” on news programs, and in Ford’s case a Merrill Lynch job where he appears to do nothing but draw a salary.

Worse yet, it appears Ford actually chose to file his taxes in Tennessee to avoid paying New York rates.

When it comes to his shadow run for Senate, Harold Fordis a New Yorker through and through. When it comes to paying taxes, though, he’s still a Tennessean — he’s never filed a New York return. Gawker

Who is Harold Ford Fooling?