This week’s Nashville Scene runs a profile on Rep. Harold Ford, Jr., the young Democratic congressman from Memphis who’s vocally contemplating a run for the Senate when Bill Frist vacates his seat in 2006.
It's an enlightening blend of political profile and political handicapping, as Scene writer Roger Abramson outlines the major assets and obstacles to a Ford campaign. Some of these are handled in a fashion that is, as we shall see, distinctively Nashville - or distinctively Nashville Scene - most notably the issue of Ford's race. Ford is black. Abramson suggests this may pose a problem, not because some white voters might be reluctant to elect a black Senator, but because those nasty Northern journalists (everything bad in the South, you see, is the fault of Northerners) might, if they cover the racial angle in a condescending manner, offend those precious "independent, middle-of-the-road voters" (read: white people in SUVs) into not voting for Ford. Merely raising the issue is an affront to their open-mindedness! Abramson makes the good point, of course, that race isn't just an issue in the South - New York has never elected a black Senator, nor Maryland, nor most other states. Then again, they never put up monuments to Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest, either.
But all this is the Scene's problem. The truly illuminating, and potentially disturbing, part of the profile is what it shows about Ford himself.
He’s open to Social Security privatization. He supported the war in Iraq. He’s against gay marriage and he waffles on the Bush tax cuts, opposing the President’s deficits but claiming (at least in the words of the Scene – and bear in mind the Scene will always bend over backwards not to appear too liberal, kind of like the nerd who mocks his own buddies when the jocks are around because he thinks it might keep him from getting sand kicked in his face) that he’s “not much on class warfare.” Okay, Harold, that tells us your position on beheading King Louis XVI – now what about the Bush tax cuts?
This litany of positions generates a couple of real concerns about Ford. First of all, he shows a willingness, almost an eagerness, to digest and regurgitate Republican rhetoric and spin. If you’re going to call a progressive tax system and balanced budgets “class warfare,” and if you’re going to buy into the myth that Social Security is insolvent, then you’ve conceded two major ideological victories to the Republican party.
But there’s another, even more important question: Why, other than expediency, is Harold Ford, Jr. a Democrat? (By “other than expediency,” I mean other than the fact that he’s from a heavily Democratic district and an old, entrenched, and corrupt Democratic family machine.) Yes, it got him elected, but if he supports Social Security privatization and tax cuts and opposes equal rights for all Americans, then why is he a Democrat?
This is not the outraged accusation you might think it’d be, but instead a serious question - not just for Ford, but for the entire Democratic party. If your official position on all the “wedge issues” is effectively indistinguishable from the Republicans’, then what makes you a better alternative? What can you say to convince voters that you’re not just Republican Lite?
If the Democrats can formulate an answer to that question, then maybe they can start rebuilding their frayed coalition – and a party that can reasonably include people with my views and people with Harold Ford’s is one that has a good shot at reclaiming offices all over the nation.
I was reminded of someone who, if he didn't have the answer, was at least asking the right questions when I caught Howard Dean's appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher last night. The brief interview seemed like a flashback to some sunny afternoon last autumn, sometime before Dean's rapid fall from grace. He was forthright, he was articulate, and he refused to let the Bush administration frame the issues that are facing this country – all in all, a bittersweet reminder that Dean was probably better as an outsider than he was as a front-runner. (When he assumed the lead, he became not only a panderer but a pretty maladroit one; the “metrosexual” comment was probably my least favorite moment of his campaign, but it had some competition.)
The interview was also a reminder that he can still throw some heat. In castigating Bush for lying about Iraq’s nonexistent threat to the United States, in excoriating Bush's abysmal domestic record, and in pointing out that no Republican President has balanced a budget in 34 years, Dean showed that there are many issues in which Democrats will find themselves not simply on the right side, but on the same side as the rest of the country.
The Democrats are well-positioned - more thanks to Bush, I must point out, than to their own initiative - to be the party of fiscal responsibility, the party of effective governance, the party of respect for civil liberties, and above all the party that doesn't lie. That's not quite a coherent ideology, but it's a good start toward one. It's a set of values that can be turned into a simple, clear argument for why government works and why they're the people to run it, that can explain why Harold Ford, Jr. and Howard Dean and I are all in the same party, and why most other Americans ought to vote for them.
But they'd better get started.
Okay, it has nothing to do with this post, but it irked me nonetheless. Did you see this?
Posted by: ezrael | March 21, 2004 at 11:52 PM