Nashville
HOWARD DEAN famously groused that southerners vote on “guns, God, and gays.” Harold Ford Jr. seems to agree. The five-term Tennessee congressman has a TV ad in which he walks among church pews. On the campaign trail, he hands out “business cards” with his name on the front and the Ten Commandments on the back. During one debate he stressed the importance of “putting God first.” He recently told an audience in the West Tennessee town of Camden, “I love Jesus.”
Standard Republican boilerplate? Not quite. Ford is a Democrat, looking to fill the Senate seat vacated by retiring GOP majority leader Bill Frist. By drenching his message in pious imagery, he hopes to bridge the “God gap” that often vexes Democrats stumping in the South. While in rural Camden, Ford also talked tough on illegal immigration, boasted of his votes for tax cuts, and threw in some kind words about Ronald Reagan. He refuses to be tarred as a “liberal Democrat,” and he has made striking gains among traditionally Republican voters, expanding the ranks of his support well beyond his inner-city base in Memphis.
If it seems like “Harold Ford” has been in Congress for several decades, that’s because Ford took over Tennessee’s 9th district from his father, Harold Ford Sr., who served for 22 years. The largely black district covers most of urban Memphis, where the Ford family has built an effective political machine. If elected next month, Harold Ford Jr. will be the first African-American senator from the South since Reconstruction.
He has certainly run a shrewd campaign. Ford’s nimble appeal to rural, conservative, and God-fearing Tennesseans could serve as a case study for Democrats seeking to make inroads in the Bible belt. Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) spokesman Phil Singer says Ford “has been very smart” about courting GOP voters on their turf, both geographically and ideologically.
A recent headline in the Memphis Commercial Appeal spoke volumes: “On guns, gays and God, Corker and Ford agree.” Bob Corker, a former mayor of Chattanooga, is the Republican Senate nominee. He and Ford both claim to oppose gun control, support the Federal Marriage Amendment, support an anti-flag-burning amendment, and favor school prayer. They differ somewhat on abortion, but both identify themselves as “pro-life.”
Ford, a 36-year-old bachelor, has been a rising star in the Democratic party virtually since he entered Congress in 1997 at the age of 26. He gave the keynote speech at the 2000 convention, and mulled Senate bids in 2000 and 2002 before deciding to wait until this year. After the 2002 election he challenged Nancy Pelosi for the post of House minority leader, saying the Californian was too liberal. The caucus vote went 177-29 in Pelosi’s favor, but Ford used the moment to boost his visibility and improve his standing among party moderates.
His record in the House is mixed, but on balance Ford cuts a centrist (if at times partisan) figure. An avowed New Democrat, he has voted to trim capital-gains and estate taxes, but also opposed the two major GOP tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. He touted the benefits of private Social Security accounts during the late 1990s, but changed his tune when President Bush took up the cause.
Ford was also a premature Iraq hawk. In December 2001 he was the lone House Democrat to sign a letter urging the Bush administration to target Saddam Hussein. The only other Democrat in Congress who signed was Senator Joe Lieberman. Ford later endorsed the 2002 Iraq war resolution, but like many he has become sharply critical of the war’s progress. Just last month he bucked most Democrats by supporting the Detainee Treatment Act, a compromise bill on military tribunals and the interrogation of terror suspects worked out principally by the White House and Republican senator John McCain.
“In the Senate, Harold can really make a difference,” says a longtime Washington lawyer who once worked for the House Republicans. “He’s gonna be the next John Breaux.” Breaux, a three-term Democratic senator from Louisiana who retired in 2004, had enough credibility with Republicans to act as a bipartisan broker on issues ranging from health care to taxes. Of course, the Senate Democratic caucus, much like its GOP counterpart, has a way of turning professed “centrists” into lockstep partisans.
Ford’s top pollster, Pete Brodnitz, helped Democrat Tim Kaine win the Virginia governor’s race in 2005. That bodes well for Ford. So do the coattails of popular Democratic governor Phil Bredesen, who is cruising to reelection with nearly a 40-point lead. “In Tennessee, the governor’s race tends to drive turnout,” says a senior state Democratic official. “The environment is much friendlier to us than it is to Mr. Corker.” This official also believes that independents–who amount to the biggest bloc of Tennessee voters–are tilting toward Ford, partly out of frustration with Bush and the GOP Congress.
In early October, Rasmussen and Gallup both had Ford leading Corker by five points. The Democrat appeared to be surging. But the past few weeks have seen a shift. Corker’s campaign received a facelift with the recent addition of veteran Tennessee operative Tom Ingram as campaign manager, and the race now appears to be extremely close with Corker perhaps enjoying a small lead.
Ingram, who serves as chief of staff to GOP senator (and former Tennessee governor) Lamar Alexander, says he moved the campaign away from an ideological focus and tried to “redefine the choice”: between Ford, a “career politician” and a D.C. insider “whose entire life is about perpetuating the family dynasty,” and Corker, a “diehard East Tennessean” with a “proven track record of solving complex problems with bold solutions.” Ford grew up in Washington and attended the tony St. Alban’s prep school. Now, says Ingram, he’s trying to sell Tennesseans a bill of goods by posing as a conservative.
With his folksy charm and pleasant twang, the former Chattanooga mayor and wealthy construction magnate seems an ideal GOP candidate for Tennessee, in the mold of Howard Baker and Fred Thompson. Tennessee may be a “red” state–Bush won here by 14 points in 2004–but it’s decidedly more moderate than, say, Mississippi or South Carolina. (Tennessee split its loyalties during the Civil War.) In a new TV ad Thompson provides the voiceover, extolling Corker’s feats as mayor, couching his life as a pure product of Tennessee, and linking him to the Senate “tradition” of Baker, Alexander, and Frist.
Corker emerged in August from a brutal primary, which featured two former GOP congressmen–Ed Bryant and Van Hilleary–who both attacked him from the right. He wound up on the defensive over abortion: During his 1994 Senate bid, Corker was pro-choice. Now he says he’s changed his mind, and hopes to see Roe v. Wade overturned. (Ford, too, has flip-flopped on abortion: He opposed a ban on partial-birth abortion while Bill Clinton was president, then supported the one that Bush signed in 2003. But Ford has shied away from talk of reversing Roe, and the National Right to Life Committee has endorsed Corker.)
“You take on some water in a tough primary,” Corker told me. “At the same time, you become battle-tested.” After the primary, Corker relaxed his media efforts, which, Ingram says, “was just a tactical error.” Both Bryant and Hilleary are now aiding Corker on the campaign trail. Corker paints himself as a fairly orthodox, if independent-minded, conservative. He backs the Bush tax cuts, opposes embryonic stem-cell research, cheers the ascension of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, and rejects any sort of “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.
On that last point, the DSCC and the Ford campaign have fired back, claiming that Corker once employed “undocumented workers” at one of his construction sites. Democrats also pound Corker for raising property taxes while he was mayor and for not disclosing his personal IRS returns. The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) meanwhile blasts Ford’s “hypocrisy on moral values,” citing his alleged trip to a Playboy Super Bowl party in 2005. The NRSC has even sponsored a snarky website, www.FancyFord.com, which tells voters that Ford “likes to live the good life . . . perhaps a little too much.”
There is a wild card in this race: the Ford family’s legal troubles. Ford has seen one uncle convicted of insurance fraud; another uncle now sits on trial for bribery, witness tampering, and extortion. His father, Harold Ford Sr., was indicted–though eventually acquitted–in a bank fraud case.
In another weird twist, Ford’s brother Jake, who has an arrest record, is running to fill Ford’s House seat as an independent. In turn, the Ford family has more or less decided to oppose the Democratic candidate for the open seat. Harold Jr. has not endorsed the Democratic candidate, and Harold Sr. is campaigning for Jake. Says Ingram, the family drama “has every Democrat in Memphis and West Tennessee in a tizzy.”
Many Tennesseans are surprised that a Democrat with so much baggage has run such a close race against an attractive Republican candidate. The success of Ford’s campaign “is the most shocking thing a person could have witnessed in Tennessee politics in a lifetime,” says Bruce Dobie, a conservative Democrat and media entrepreneur in Nashville. “It’s just astonishing all the way across the board.” A Ford victory would arguably be the Senate upset of the year. It might also portend a long election night for Republicans.
Duncan Currie is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
