Harold Ford Would Be Even Worse For New York Than An Actual Republican

Saturday's my birthday. I was born in New York City but I've now lived in California longer than I did in New York. Doesn't matter; I'll always been from NY. When I was 21 I spent a winter in a tiny hamlet in the Hindu Kush where no one spoke Farsi, let alone English. In fact no one had ever heard of the United States or experienced electricity. When I got back to Kabul in the spring my friends all noticed that my Brooklyn accent was as strong as ever-- although my Pashto was almost passable. I don't remember 10 words of Pashto (or Farsi/Dari) but my Brooklyn accent... I could still be living on East 17th Street between O and P, around the corner from Dubrow's or in Atlantic Towers on Homecrest Avenue just beyond Avenue Z. There's about as much a chance that someone would mistake me from an Afghan as for a Californian.

Soon after I first got to San Francisco a Sufi connection from the meditation center I worked at in Amsterdam got me a job at a p.r. firm off Union Square. One day I picked up the phone and there was a distressed, actually hysterical, woman on the line, a friend, she said, of my boss, and she was threatening to jump out of a window. I went into red alert mode and interrupted my boss, who calmly told me to put her on hold and get back to work. How inhuman, I thought. I went back to the damsel in distress and talked her off the ledge-- a proverbial one, it turned out, more or less. It was the beginning of a close friendship, which ended a few years ago when she was brutally murdered. Her father had been a notorious Mafia don; he had been brutally murdered too-- before I met her. He left her a lot of money; she was my first wealthy friend. I used to stay at her mansion in Pacific Heights and when I went to New York City I stayed in her snazzy apartment on Sutton Place, a part of New York I had heard of but never been too. It wasn't for people from Brooklyn.

Sutton Place gave me the creeps. It didn't smell like the NYC I knew. It smelled... like money; it smelled Republican. Oh, yes, there are Republicans in NYC. I once read a report on George W. Bush political donations by zip code. The biggest donor zip codes for his campaign where from Manhattan-- Sutton Place included. The Republicans in NYC hardly run for office anymore-- or if they do, it's as part of a freakshow like Giuliani or Bloomberg. If you hear about a Republican elected official in NYC, it's probably someone from Staten Island or maybe a sociopath from Queens. But the big Republican money in New York City doesn't go to waste. It goes to the state-- well that has been a waste-- and national parties and their candidates. But it also goes towards making the Democratic Party more.... well, more Republican.

It's not a coincidence that much of the power inside the Democratic Establishment is conservative power-- especially when it comes to financial matters. Wall Street wealth searches out amenable (i.e., easily corruptible if not ideologically predisposed) Democrats to nurture. That is certainly why Rahm Emanuel wound up in the House leadership after one term and why he's now the White House Chief-of-Staff. And it also goes a long way towards explaining Harold Ford's bid for a New York Senate seat.

Ford's Memphis House seat was part of the family business he inherited from his father, Harold Ford, Sr. The family's political shenanigans are a caricature of the kind of political corruption that preys on inner city populations. In the House Ford was the most conservative Democrat representing a major urban area in the country. And one of the most corrupt. To this day, when you look up who the Financial Sector has most favored, Harold Ford, Jr is still up near the top. In the entire history of the U.S. House of Representatives the only congressional criminals who have managed to rake in more than the $3,682,599 Big Finance gave Ford, are senators plus 4 members of the House expressly working on Wall Street-- ex-Chairman of the House Banking Subcommittee on Housing Rick Lazio, who went on to "work" as an executive vice president of JPMorgan Chase (R-NY- $6,424,123), ex-Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-MO- $5,094,782), Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Charlie Rangel ($4,602,317) and Ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee (and notorious insider-stock trader), Spencer Bachus (R-AL- $4,107,424. That's right, Big Finance has given more to their boy Ford than they have to their biggest and most corrupt GOP bets, Eric Cantor ($3,677,585), John Boehner ($3,369,029), Roy Blunt ($3,080,155), Pete Sessions ($2,929,240), Mark Kirk ($2,879,320), Bill McCollum ($2,722,300), Mike Castle ($2,684,612), Jeb Hensarling ($2,440,100), Tom DeLay ($2,261,566), David Dreier ($2,199,788) and Paul Ryan ($1,726,095).

Earlier today Maureen Dowd did a Times column about Ford's possible run in New York. She termed him "the darling of what he calls the 'Manhattan social philanthropic crowd.'” Not what you would have found around Dubrow's or Sheepshead Bay or at James Madison High School, where Ken and I were students, along with Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, and, a few years earlier, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She describes Ford as a "Merrill Lynch rainmaker," a nice way of saying he used his influence to suck taxpayer dollars from our pockets and put it into the pockets of Wall Street fatcats-- like himself. He's currently a Vice-Chairman of Bank of America in charge of stealing taxpayer money.

[H]e gets pedicures and has breakfast at the Regency on Park Avenue (where Rielle Hunter famously picked up John Edwards by calling him “so hot”). He often gets chauffeured by MSNBC to his gigs on Morning Joe and has flown to the boroughs in a helicopter... There are top Democrats who find Ford too slick. “He could sell a snowball in a blizzard,” said one... Being a Wall Street bonus baby is not a plus. “I’m not running from the fact that I worked at a bank and brought in clients,” he said. “Am I proud of everything that went on? Of course not.”

He didn't give back the millions of dollars he's pocketed though-- so I guess he isn't that not proud. Ford is the living, breathing definition of the words "self-serving" and "sleazy," a stereotype of the very worst politics can throw up.

In 2006 the Blue America PAC enthusiastically endorsed Kirsten Gillibrand for her first-- and successful-- run for Congress. One fourth of all the money she raised online came from 584 Blue America donors. We didn't endorse her again in 2008 because she had joined the Blue Dog caucus and I was disappointed when she was appointed to Hillary Clinton's Senate seat. That said, she has been a decent senator (with a ProgressivePunch score of 97.90, not quite as good as Sherrod Brown's 99.32 or Sheldon Whitehouse's 98.64, but slightly better than Al Franken's 97.84 and Bernie Sanders' 96.99) and even as a Blue Dog was never a gratuitously conservative a-hole like Ford.

With solid progressive Jonathan Tasini as her only opponent in the primary, Blue America pretty much decided to steer clear of endorsing her-- and even considered endorsing Tasini. But then Wall Street's candidate stepped in and now we're wondering about this race again. Suggestions are welcome.