“I have been encouraged to look at it, and we are making calls to chairs and talking to them about it, and trying to gauge the support that might be there,” Vanderhoef confirmed to me by phone. “This is exploratory, getting a sense of what’s going on in the state.”

Vanderhoef, who fought a dirty campaign against Thom Kleiner to win a fifth term as County Executive just this past November, has told the Albany Times Union that he’s reached out to county party chairs upstate, despite some of them having endorsed Bruce Blakeman, who has been actively running for the Senate as a Republican. Billionaire Mort Zuckerman recently announced that he will not seek the Senate nomination. According to the Times Union, Vanderhoef is working with a well-connected GOP operative.

In addition to his interest in running for Comptroller and Senator, the former which he announced the only one day after he began his fifth term as Executive, Vanderhoef has run for Congress and Lieutenant Governor while at the helm of Rockland County. There have also been reports that Vanderhoef has sought the Presidency of Rockland Community College and an top position with Giuliani Partners while Executive.

While I am not against politicians seeking higher office, Vanderhoef has made it very clear that he does not care much for his job. His public job-search exploits have been a distraction and many people have begun to wonder whether Vanderhoef is paying enough attention to the County and its serious financial problems. Under his watch the County has consistently faced eight-digit shortfalls due to the Executive’s perennial revenue miscalculations. Vanderhoef has become Rockland County’s King Nero that fiddles as the County budget burns. While our taxes have risen, services have been cut, and County salaries have been frozen, Vanderhoef  had the nerve to ram through a 12.5 percent salary increase for himself in December. And just a few months into another four-year term, does Vanderhoef think he has accomplished what he was elected to do?

Right now, many people are wondering, and rightfully so, whether Governor David Paterson should resign his post. Beyond his ethical lapses, the question is whether Paterson can competently handle matters of the State of New York while being distracted with other serious issues. I believe the same criteria should apply to Vanderhoef; if the County Executive will become too busy running for higher office over the next eight months should he continue to serve the county? Rockland is in the midst of its greatest financial crisis in a generation and attending to our problems should trump political aspirations. I, for one, do not like the idea of unelected underlings of Vanderhoef’s taking the helm of the county while he abandon’s his post for a full-time statewide campaign.

I’m putting politics aside and my concerns for the Rockland first when I ask that the County Executive either drop the idea of running for the Senate or resign as County Executive. This is no time for an absentee leader.

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.

There’s already a lot of finger pointing going on. Martha Coakley is pointing fingers at the party, the party is pointing fingers back. They both share in the blame. That neither Democratic National Chairman Tim Kaine nor Coakley saw this train wreck coming tells us that we had the wrong people at the helm.

Coakley won’t be going to the Senate, but Kaine continues to chair the DNC. He’s keeping his job, it seems. But I think that Democrats must wake up now and realize that Tim Kaine is no Howard Dean.

The media is having a field day with Kaine’s counterpart, Michael Steele. They doubt every move he makes and ridicule every off-the-cuff remark. Steele, in the eyes of the media and many Republicans, is nothing more than a buffoon. I happen to agree. The Republican Party is in trouble: they have no cash, there’s dissent within the party, and they continue to partake into wedge-issue politics. The GOP’s pick of Dede Scozzafava to run for an open Congressional seat in New York was a blunder of epic proportions. Bill Owens barely winning in that district was not so much a victory for the Democrats as it was a default decision since he ended up with no Republican Party rival.

But Michael Steele, as incompetent as he is, has also won two important gubernatorial elections and one Senate election. Tim Kaine has not won anything for his party. He didn’t even win the Virginia Governor’s Mansion that he vacated for his party. If Michael Steele deserves no credit for the Republican victories in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, then Tim Kaine deserves all the blame. If you can’t outmaneuver a fool like Steele and let him take three leadership positions away from your party, what worth are you to your party?

You can’t just dismiss these three elections by claiming that one state was leaning conservative, another hated its governor, and the third was hobbled with a bad Democratic candidate. There are no excuses! Just a year ago, the Dems, under Howard Dean, greatly increased its presence in State Houses across the nation, in governor’s mansions, in the House and Senate, and it’s Presidential candidate won by a landslide. The Democrats were crushing the Republicans. Some pundits thought it was the end of the Republican Party.

Then Dean stepped down as DNC chair and Kaine took the reins. Kaine has gone back to the old strategies of raising money and hoping that your candidates can win without a message.

This is what the Democratic Party has returned to: Take money from lobbyists, give into their demands on legislation, and try to win elections by outspending the opposition. The problem is: that doesn’t work. Voters are starting to believe that the Democratic Party is selling out to corporate interests and I’m not so sure they’re wrong from the looks of the latest Health Care Reform bill.

Now we’re getting our asses kicked by a party that’s continues to be in disarray and that’s lead by an obvious bonehead.

One sad thing that I noticed in the Massachusetts Senate race was that that quite a few single-payer health care proponents were supporting Brown. They wanted to “Kill the Bill” as it now reads, because all it guarantees is access to health care, without dealing with affordability, and requiring mandates. So, the Democrats lost their progressive base in a progressive commonwealth. So explain to me how do you win without your base?

In Massachusetts, they’re currently suffering over a poorly cobbled together health care law—Mitt Romney’s crowning achievement by the way—that has been a disaster because premiums are skyrocketing in the state and it’s killing small business owners. Now we have a Democratic Party that is trying to pass through a similar, watered-down health care bill on the national level. So what do you expect from the residents of the Bay State? It’s no wonder why so many Democrats voted for Brown.

Yes, Coakley ran an extremely bad campaign. She acted aloof and entitled. She became the Rabbit to Brown’s Tortoise. All Brown had to do was drive a pickup truck through the Commonwealth, get the attention of a few tea-party crazies to go with the angry (but misguided) moderates and independents that began to lean his way and he had a enough troops to make it a race.

Meanwhile, the progressive base of the Democratic Party—those that were motivated to get out the vote in 2008—have been neglected ever since that election. Rahm Emanuel insulted progressives at every turn and Tim Kaine said nothing. President Obama governed from the right-center, not even throwing these stalwarts a bone.

Being mocked by Emanuel and ignored by Kaine and Obama upset many of my progressive colleagues, and many of them won’t raise a finger to help Democrats now. Some of them, as I said above, even voted for the other side. They feel used. After all, it was the progressives that gave the Democrats a majority in 2006 and an unprecedented majority and the White House in 2008. And then they were kicked to the curb.

While this race should be a wake-up call for the Democrats to run better candidates, I think it proves my theory that without your base, you’re nothing. And the progressives are the base of the Democratic Party.

Tim Kaine lost yesterday’s election. He also dismissed the progressives since his ascent to the DNC Chair a year ago, which helped the Democrats lose that election. It’s now the turn of progressives to toss Tim Kaine.

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The opinion in this column is the viewpoint of the author and not necessarily that of the Rockland Progressive Democratic Caucus.