Now that we know Harold Ford pays sales tax, have I ever told you the story of the Hotel Tax Lady in San Francisco?

by Ken

I'm still chuckling over the update Howie added to his post earlier today on our senator-to-be (if Wall Street has its way, apparently), Harold Ford Jr., and his unexpected link to the ghost of onetime NYC Comptroller Mario "The Hanging Judge" Procaccino.

Heck, it was a kick just to see the old thug's name again after all these years. He was a character, was our Mario, though I'm not sure he was really as close as Richard Reeves is quoted as believing he was to being elected mayor in 1969, when John Lindsay was standing for reelection.

This is embarrassing, coming as it does just days after I myself paid tribute to Reeves. I just question one of his premises here. He called Procaccino's "the worst political campaign in American history," and charged the judge with "snatch[ing] defeat from the jaws of victory." Now it's certainly true that in the 1969 mayoral race, with New York City's limited Republican voter base split between conservative State Sen. John Marchi, the official Republican candidate, and maverick Republican Lindsay running on the Liberal line, pretty much any Democrat should have been able to walk right on through the goal posts. The thing is, our Mario wasn't "any" Democrat. He was a hack who had no reason to exist except for his famous tough-on-crime "law 'n' order" posture. So yeah, he ran a feeble campaign, but that campaign was who he was. What else did he have to run on?

But I digress. Howie's point was that it was Judge Mario who, during that race, coined the phrase "limousine liberals" to cover people like the hated John Lindsay, and now, all these decades letter, the phrase is available to cover Senator-to-be Ford, who dumped his home state of Tennessee after the voters there dumped him, and moved to New York to lead the lifestyle of the rich and famous. In my own mind, I keep doubting that he'll make the Senate run because I don't think he's willing to take the pay cut.

Howie's new point about our Harold is that he appears to be using his old home state as a tax haven, paying its lower income tax rates instead of the higher ones of the state he's contemplating representing in the U.S. Senate. And then some defender or defenders of Harold's piped in to say that it's a cruel calumny to accuse him of not paying taxes in New York. Why, he pays sales tax! This is so pathetic that I think we really need more information about who actually thought this was an answer. Sales tax???

But now that we've descended to this level of preposterousness, I'm wondering, did I ever tell you my story about the infamous Hotel Tax Lady?

It all happened in 1985, when the San Francisco Opera was undertaking a staging of Wagner's Ring cycle, something that back then represented quite a substantial financial gamble, considering the staggering cost involved and the uncertain prospect for ticket sales. The ever-alert weasels of the Music Critics Association sensed an opportunity here, knowing that San Francisco's Ring could be a great draw for the association's annual meeting, since the prospect of free tickets to the event around which the meeting is organized is normally part of the deal. (Heck, it got me there.) Provided, of course, they could get Terry McEwen, who was running the San Francisco Opera then, to cough up the necessary tickets.

It probably killed Terry. Why, he as much as told us so himself in his "welcoming" speech. He was one of the better-known figures in the American classical music business, and he already had a lifetime dislike of critics from his years as manager of the classical division of Decca Records' U.S. company, London Records. And in his charming, chuckling way, he expressed pretty open regret that he had committed himself to giving away all those Ring tickets. He'd agreed, he explained, back when he was losing sleep over whether he'd be able to sell enough Ring tickets to avoid financial disaster. In the interim he'd discovered that the demand for tickets was enormous. He could have sold as many tickets as he had available, and here he'd gone and given all those freebies -- to critics!

It so happened that at that year's meeting there was a working session devoted to ethics. "So happened" indeed -- there's always a session on ethics. For people who don't have any, it's amazing how much they like to talk about them. You don't suppose they think it's the same thing, do you?

One obvious topic of discussion was the ethics of all of us accepting all those free tickets from the San Francisco Opera and then turning around and reviewing the show. Or even not reviewing it -- just the general propriety of taking free stuff. It's a perennial issue, because it can't be solved. Only the really rich people who could afford to buy all their tickets and records and books and whatever would be available to review stuff if reviewers were to pay for all that stuff. But that means, inescapably, that in some measure you become part of the publicity machine. As I say, it's a perennial problem, and the only solution I see, which isn't even a solution, is just to be aware of it. Like I said, it doesn't solve anything; I just feel better about the critics who at least remain aware of the conflict.

Of course at these sessions there will always be people who stand up and righteously insist that they're not affected by the gift, no sir! As if the very act of making that indignant denial isn't part of the effect that taking the gifts has. (These would be the people I'm least inclined to trust.) But the Hotel Tax Lady came at the problem from an angle of her own, God bless her.

You have to follow her chain of reasoning carefully. It rested on a series of premises.

(1) The city of San Francisco was kicking in a certain amount of subsidy to the Opera to help mount the Ring production. (True.)

(2) The city of San Francisco, pressed for revenue, had instituted a tax on all hotel stays, a hotel tax. (True.)

(3) We're all staying in hotels, right? (Not entirely true, but close enough.)

(4) And so we're paying the hotel tax, right? (Um, with the above stipulation, but, uh . . .)

(5) And so our tax money is going to the San Francisco Opera, and we've really paid for our tickets!

[In the absence of a rimshot, let's take a dramatic pause to let this sink in.]

I learned something that day. Where there's a will to obfuscate, obfuscation probably isn't far behind.

After all, Senator Ford pays sales tax.

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Harold Ford Jr. And Mario Procaccino-- Conservative Democrats Among Life's Losers

Do all conservatives have black hearts?

Harold Ford and I have something in common. Neither of us pays taxes in New York, although I used to (when I lived there); he never did-- and he lives there now. I pay my taxes in California, where the top bracket rate is 10.55%. The top rate in New York is 8.97%, so I'm not exactly saving any money by paying taxes here. Ford, on the other hand, saves quite a bit by filing in Tennessee, where the rate is only 6%. He's being squirrely about how much he actually makes as Vice-Chairman of Merrill Lynch (he refuses to divulge how much his tax-payer-funded bonuses were). But his base pay was a million dollars so... state tax in Tennessee was $60,000, instead of the $89,700 he would have paid in NYC (not counting the bonus which is rumored to be far more than a million dollars). Ford has been lying to the public about everything, so it should have surprised no one to learn his lies about paying taxes in New York were just that.

If you're wondering how a homophobic, anti-Choice, conservative loser from Tennessee wound up in New York Democratic politics... well, Wall Street has always loved him and they singled him out for special treatment long ago-- just the way they did with virulently pro-Wall Street patsies Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), Mark Kirk (R-IL), Mike Castle (R-DE), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Rick Lazio (R-NY) and Paul Ryan (R-WI). They've lavished millions of dollars on each of them, helping them build political power in the hopes, that one day they will be in a position to influence policies that make Wall Street even more powerful than it already is.

In the history of the House of Representatives, the only non-Senators who have gotten more in legal contributions from the Finance Sector than Ford ($3,682,599) were Rick Lazio ($6,424,123), who, like Ford and Emanuel, used the Wall Street revolving door to personally enrich himself; Minority Leader Dick Gephardt ($5,094,782); Ways & Means Chairman Charlie Rangel ($4,602,317); and ex-Chairman of the Banking Oversight Committee and notorious inside trader Spencer Bachus ($4,107,424). Yes, even more than they've given to their most dependable puppets like Eric Cantor, Denny Hastert, Paul Kanjorski, John Boehner, Pete Sessions, Paul Ryan and Jeb Hensarling!

Ford had, by then, settled down in New York with his new wife, Emily Threlkeld, a fashion industry executive whose stepfather, Anson Beard, is a legendary Wall Street figure. And around that same time, with Hillary Clinton running for president and an open seat in his adopted hometown likely to open up, people around Ford began pondering an audacious New York run.

Back in 2008, Threlkeld mentioned to a friend that Ford was considering making the race, the friend said. Gov. David Paterson’s choice of Gillibrand, a little-known upstate congressman, to fill Clinton’s seat after she resigned to become secretary of state, fueled the interest.

Ford started hearing about it at cocktail parties: Influential figures like fundraisers Steve Rattner and Maureen White, who had long had a rocky relationship with Gillibrand, were urging him to run. He seemed, said one member of that scene who talked to him about the Senate, like he was “bored” with his banking job and ready for a new challenge.

Ford fills the sort of hazy role at Merrill traditionally occupied by political stars at New York investment firms. They’re rainmakers and image buffers, there to impress clients, make connections and put a politic foot forward in public settings.

But Ford arrived at the tail of the boom and stayed at Merrill through its absorption by Bank of America and through a controversial round of bonuses at the end of 2008. His spokesman, Davidson Goldin, declined to say whether he’d received one, but New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has requested information on the bonuses from the bank, which received federal support to weather the crisis.

What brought Ford to mind this weekend wasn't his appearance on Meet The Press but some research into another extremely conservative high-profile New York politician-- but from my childhood. In high school, Ken and I used to love making fun of a clueless Bronx political hack, Judge Mario Procaccino, who ran what journalist Richard Reeves termed "the worst political campaign in American history." At one point it looked like his mean-spirited conservatism would beat out Mayor John Lindsay's liberal Republicanism, but Procaccino was so inept that he actually addressed (uncomfortably) an African-American gathering and assured them that "My heart is as black as yours." Probably just as black as Harold Ford's, but Ford was just born a few months after Procaccino sealed his fate and got dumped onto the rubbish pile of history.

Procaccino died in 1995, long forgotten by the world of politics (outside Ken and me), but he left behind one tiny little bit of trivia as his political legacy, and this legacy is what-- even more than their shared conservatism-- is what ties him to Harold Ford. Procaccino invented the term "limousine liberal" in his campaign against Lindsay. Unless you want to call Ford a "helicopter conservative," much of what the judge had to say about Lindsay well describes Ford. His tirade against Lindsay was that his supporters were the types who "live in penthouses and who send their children to private schools and who have doormen and who don't ride the subways." (Let me assure you that neither Ken nor I had ever been in a penthouse. Nor did we know anyone who went to private school-- except for some Italians in the neighborhood who went to parochial school-- nor did either of us have a doorman. And when we could scrounge up the 15 cents for a token, we loved to ride the subway.) Like the vast majority of people who live in a world of limousines and penthouses and doormen, Ford is a conservative, and, like most of them, a tax cheat.

UPDATE: Sales Tax

Ford defenders lamely posit he wasn't lying when he claimed that he pays taxes in New York because he does pay sales taxes! Does that mean some Chinese Communist functionary stationed in NY, the way Ford is, who buys melamine-free milk at the corner grocery and pays sales tax is also entitled to run for the Senate seat? Or how about the 45 million tourists who visit New York annually and buy something and pay sales tax? Are they all entitled to run for the U.S. Senate?