Harold Ford, Jr. vs. the facts
Former Congressman Harold Ford has been making local and national headlines recently. He has tentatively dipped his toe into a primary race against Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand this fall and he held one of his first meet and greets in Rockland County last week at the invitation of Orangetown Councilman Michael Maturo.
But Democrats shouldn’t be fooled by Harold Ford. Instead, they should get to know Ford behind the slick persona that has mesmerized some of our local political leaders.
And I’m not going to even get into the fact that he’s Vice Chairman of Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, a bank that received $45 billion in TARP loans, but continues to screw this country out of a much needed recovery by tightening credit lines and choking the aspirations individuals and small businesses.
No, what I want to talk about is much worse than that: Ford has run as an anti-abortion candidate in Tennessee as recently as his Senate run in 2006. While real Democratic candidates and public servants were campaigning hard to promise they would fight to ensure women’s reproductive rights, Ford promised the opposite.
As Bush’s conservative appointees began to dominate the Federal Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, reproductive rights were at risk, but Ford did not stand up for women. Instead, as a Member of Congress, a candidate, and a political commentator Ford claimed to be “Pro Life” and even supported a ban on partial-birth abortion.
Being pro-choice means a politician fights unwaveringly for a woman’s right to her own medical decisions, even when it is not popular. Ford, however, played politics with this issue in his Tennessee Senate race and proclaimed himself pro-life and spending campaign money on ads to showcase his anti-choice record.
Now he decries the “Pro Life” label in the New York Post because it being “Pro Choice” suits his political ambitions in New York. But in Tennessee in 2006, he stated clearly that he was “pro-life” and that you “don’t run from that.”
Beyond the issue of reproductive rights, Ford has been far from progressive in other areas.
While a member of Congress, Ford supported a ban on benefits for same-sex couples. Later Ford supported the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would have banned same-sex marriage nationwide.
Ford was a supporter of the Iraq war as a Congressman, going as far as to chide his fellow Democrats that they should be more supportive of the war.
Ford was also one of the few Democrats to support the Republican Party’s efforts to intercede in the Terri Schiavo case and offered no apologies afterward, even when her autopsy backed her husband Michael’s Schiavo’s argument that his wife was in a persistent vegetative state state from which she could not recover.
Ford currently sits as the chairman of the conservative Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which has used the strategy of triangulation between the political left and right to create it’s own so-called “centrist” base of power. In the long run, this strategy has lead to countless concessions by the Democrats to the Republicans, while alienating labor and progressive voters. Moreover, columnist David Sirota says that the DLC’s pro-business stances leads it to consistently sell out to corporate interests. Sirota is not far off, the DLC has basically become a right-wing implant in the Democratic party. Some of its leaders, such as Marshall Whitman, also being associated with the Christian Coalition.
Harold Ford, Jr. might be running for the Senate, but he’s also running from the facts. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who once held the seat that Ford is seeking, said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” The facts are clear: Ford is not the Democratic Senator New Yorkers are seeking.
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The opinion expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and not necessarily the opinion of the Rockland Progressive Democratic Caucus.
