Harold Ford Jr and wife look on as Iggy Pop performs up close and personal at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony at the Waldorf Astoria, March 15 2010
The incongruity of Iggy Pop and the Stooges performing "I Wanna Be Your Dog" to a black tie crowd at the Waldorf is just too funny (to me anyway) not to pass along. The crowd sat stone faced throughout, perhaps stunned and/or appalled at what they were witnessing. Doubtless Harold chief among them.
The field in the battle for a New York Senate seat became a little clearer Tuesday when Mortimer B. Zuckerman announced he would not join the race.
Mr. Zuckerman, chairman and publisher of the Daily News, said personal and professional reasons were behind his decision not to challenge Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.
"I was encouraged by many major political figures in New York to look closely at running for Senate," Mr. Zuckerman said.
"However, at this time, it is very difficult to see how I can devote the necessary time to either a campaign, or to working in Washington, if I were to win."
Some of us saw this coming when he delayed his potential campaign announcement for the umpteenth time, but it's nice to see it made official. What hasn't been said already? Goodbye, good luck, and don't come back.
But Ford's timely demise isn't just a win for Senator Gillibrand, or liberals, or the netroots. It is, in fact, a win for the fledgling pro-reform movement in New York State politics.
New York politics operate on money. That's no secret, and it's not exactly different from politics anywhere else. But New York's almost total lack of campaign finance laws on the state level allow a disturbing amount of power to be wielded by a relatively small number of people who have money to burn.
Billionaire coup architect Tom Golisano is a perfect example. Golisano spent a lot of money in 2008 supporting candidates he liked. Some of them were good candidates, and good people. But when Malcolm Smith wasn't deferential enough, Golisano used his power to try and overthrow the state government.
Another example is Mike Bloomberg, the man who personified the corrosive force of money in American politics when, faced with a voter-approved limit on his term of office, simply bought all the votes he needed to stay in power.
Here's where Ford comes in. Make no mistake about it, Ford's base of support (such as it was, consisting mostly of the upper east side of Manhattan, but only above the 30th floor) was centered in and around the same kind of big money contributors who own and operate much of the dirtier side of the New York state legislature.
One of the ringleaders of this behavior (and one of Ford's major backers) is Mike Bloomberg. Another is Steve Pigeon, the "Democrat" whose most undemocratic ideas and total lack of anything resembling the human emotion of shame landed him the seat as the man behind the curtain to Pedro Espada, and the operator of the massively corrupt Independence Party.
The power that Pigeon and those like him wield is, without a doubt, the biggest single opponent to fixing what's broken in New York State government. Why? Because the privileged power brokers like the concentration of control into their own hands.
What kind of power? The power to direct state money, yes. To bend and break laws, sure. To lie, cheat, steal, and get away with it. But moreover, it's just about raw power. The power to bring the state government screeching to a halt because Malcolm Smith checked his Blackberry during a meeting with you. The power to push elections one way or the other. The power to take home a seven figure salary without paying the taxes that the plebes have to.
In a system with no campaign finance laws, no term limits, and no demand by the people that the legislature do the public business or else, power has collected around the lowest common denominator--the people most shameless in their exploitation of that broken system to reward corruption and punish underdogs.
Call it whatever you want--the center, big business, the DLC, corruption--Ford's candidacy represented a money-first view of politics, that the guys on Wall Street mattered more than what was right for New York State as a whole. And New Yorkers rejected that: in the polls, in contributions, in their participation online and across the state.
Because of that, a strong ally of reform, populism, and a fighter for New York State has sent Ford packing. Now it's time to do the same for our legislature, and get this great state back on track.
WHEN it was reported two months ago that I was thinking seriously about running for the United States Senate from New York, Democratic Party insiders started their own campaign to bully me out of the race - just as they had done with Representatives Carolyn Maloney, Steve Israel and others.
But as I traveled around New York, I began to understand why the party bosses felt the need to use such heavy-handed tactics: They're nervous. New Yorkers are clamoring for change. Our political system - so bogged down in partisan fighting - is sapping the morale of New Yorkers and preventing government at every level from fulfilling its duty.
The cruel twist, of course, is that the party bosses who tried to intimidate me so that I wouldn't even think about running against Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who had been appointed to the seat by Gov. David A. Paterson, are the same people responsible for putting Democratic control of the Senate at risk.
These are tough times, and the New Yorkers I have met are facing economic adversity with grace and dignity. They worry about their future, care about their neighbors and hope this storm will pass so they can focus on better days ahead. And yet too few in the Democratic Party are really willing to break with orthodoxy to meet these challenges. We need leaders as good as the people they represent - leaders focused on creating jobs, keeping taxes low, helping small businesses and restoring faith in government.
Voting for health care legislation that imposes billions in new taxes on New Yorkers and restricts federal financing for abortions is not good for the people of this state. Voting against critical funds necessary to ensure the survival of the financial services industry - the economic backbone of this state - is not good for the people of New York.
Tennessee transplant and former U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr. has decided not to challenge unelected incumbent Kirsten Gillibrand for her US Senate seat, sources said tonight.
"I heard from Harold Ford and he has decided not to run," said Assemblyman Vito Lopez, the Kings County Democratic chairman who had strongly indicated a willingness to back Ford.
"After giving it considerable thought and talking it over with his wife, he reached the conclusion that he would not be running, although he said he would like to remain active in the Democratic Party here," Lopez continued.
Try to contain your shock. Harold Ford's bizarre, performance art-esque campaign for a US Senate seat is over.
Under intense pressure from Democratic Party officials, Harold E. Ford Jr., the former Tennessee congressman, has decided not to challenge Sen. Kirsten E. Gillibrand in the primary this fall, according to two people told of his plans.
He has told friends that, while he is convinced he could prevail against Ms. Gillibrand, he feared the winner of the primary would have little money and remain highly vulnerable to a well-financed Republican challenger at a time when the Democratic party controls the Senate by a slim majority.
"I've examined this race in every possible way, and I keep returning to the same fundamental conclusion: If I run, the likely result would be a brutal and highly negative Democratic primary - a primary where the winner emerges weak-ened and the Republican strengthened," Mr. Ford wrote in an opinion article to be published in Tuesday's edition of The New York Times
I refuse to do anything that would help Republicans win a Senate seat in New York, and give the Senate majority to the Republicans."
In what has got to be one of the longer episodes of foreplay on record, Harold Ford announced today that we won't be favored with an announcement of his purported Senate run until David Paterson stops hogging the limelight.
Playing hard to get, are we, Harold?
If we look back, that run began with the startling Times piece that first alerted a stunned world to this possibility on January 6th.
I'm not comparing myself to Bobby Kennedy by any stretch, but he was opposed by the liberal establishment too," ... "Eleanor Roosevelt was the biggest opponent to him running"
Gack. Bad Eleanor. Oh wait, she was actually dead at the time. Still is, in fact.
And as of today, the newest word from Mr. Ford schedules the climactic moment, will he or won't he, for next week.
That's elastic enough to stretch into July at least, if he keeps this up.
In response, Mr. Ford has said that he supports a system of pay in high finance that rewards profits and punishes poor returns. "I believe that people take risk, and there are rewards if they do well; they should lose if they don't," he said in an interview several weeks ago.
As a vice chairman at Merrill Lynch, however, Mr. Ford benefited from an unusual arrangement that paid him generously regardless of how he and his firm perform. In 2007, he began working at the firm under a contract that guaranteed him annual compensation of at least $2 million, according to two people with direct knowledge of the deal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the agreement is confidential. With a bonus, his pay could well exceed that figure.
His guaranteed pay was twice that of the Merrill Lynch chief executive who hired him, E. Stanley O'Neal. Mr. O'Neal's contract assured him a base salary of $700,000, with the rest of his compensation not guaranteed, and paid out only as a bonus, records show. In some years that bonus was quite large. In 2006, for example, Mr. O'Neal's bonus was $18.5 million in cash and nearly $27 million in restricted stock, according to Equilar, a compensation-research firm.
Boy, it must be nice to get a job you're unqualified for, and where you don't appear to need to actually DO anything, in exchange for $2 million dollars a year and God knows how much for a bonus.
I wonder how many New Yorkers, put out of a job by the financial meltdown created by Harold Ford and his employer, and made possible by the policies of unregulated greed and theft that Harold Ford supports, would love to have even one one-hundredth of the deal that Ford has--even just to have a stable job where they could ply their talents in exchange for a fair rate of pay, without the obscene wealth and sense of entitlement Ford and his Wall Street buddies display.
I don't have to wonder too hard--I'm one of those people whose last job was killed by Ford-style economics.
So potential Senate candidate from New York state Harold Ford spoke to the LGBT group, Stonewall Democrats at New York City's GBLT Community Center in Greenwich Village. If you're thinking, "Gosh, that has FAIL written all over it!"You're right!
welcome to New York. Make yourself comfortable. Have a bagel.
Okay, now that we have the pleasantries out of the way, I have a few questions for you. It appears you're considering running for the Senate from my state, and you know what that means? It means that you answer to people like me, voters, bloggers, that kind of grubby folk. And it appears you're speaking tonight to the Stonewall Democrats, the largest LGBT political club in the state.
Despite disasterous polling, Former Tennessee Representative Harold Ford continues his ill-advised, non-campaign to usurp Senator Kirsten Gillibrand's seat in the US Senate. In a laughable media rollout, the career politician has discussed his love of weekly pedicures, daily breakfasts at the Park Regency Hotel, helicopter rides over the state, and accused Gillibrand of being a DC insider. But this may well take the hubris cake. He will be speaking at a gathering of the Stonewall Democrats, and LGBT chapter of the Democratic machine, at New York City's Gay Community Center.
Harold Ford of Tennessee, Merrill Lynch, the DLC, NBC and the Park Avenue Regency's campaign against the excellent Senator Kirsten Gillibrand came into closer focus yesterday -- he's anti-Obama, and pretty nasty about it.
Ford, via his LIEberman flack Tammy "Bite me" Sun attacked Gillibrand for having Obama campaign manager David Plouffe appear at a breakfast fund-raiser Monday.
Ford/Sun's vituperative language and habitual serial lying are in full display, below.
Harold Ford of Tennessee, Merrill Lynch, the DLC, NBC and the Park Avenue Regency has been campaigning against the excellent Senator Kirsten Gillibrand for six weeks now, and he remains a pathetic loser in the Siena poll.
According to the new poll, Gillibrand leads Ford by 42-16, slightly better than the 41-17 margin in last month's poll.
Harold Ford of Tennessee, Merrill Lynch, the DLC, NBC and the Park Avenue Regency, who has been campaigning against the excellent Senator Kirsten Gillibrand for six weeks now, affects to be a courtly Southern gentleman.
And, when things are going well for him, he can maintain that pose, especially around a TV camera.
But when things are not going well, like with his Bloomberg-backed campaign against Gillibrand, or when there's no camera or microphone around, he can be quite nasty.
For town and county and somewhat larger regioned offices, candidates often come before the town committee to which I belong for endorsements.
I don't anticipate Harold Ford doing this.
But we have some typical questions that we ask of candidates that are relevant. I'll post them here-- I'll even put in the answers I suspect he would give. He's welcome to answer them himself or correct the answers that I am channeling for him.
"Southern voters are interested in solutions," said Harold Ford Jr. in 2003. "They can spot a fake." Perhaps this explains Ford's subsequent decision to decamp from the South in search of a more gullible electorate.
Harold Ford of Tennessee, Merrill Lynch, the DLC, NBC and the Park Avenue Regency will be giving the keynote address to the 39th annual Legislative Conference of the New York State Association of Black and Puerto Rican Legislators tonight.
He would be wise not to give a campaign speech about how NY needs an "independent Democrat" like him in the U.S. Senate, instead of a real Democrat like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.
Gillibrand, unlike Ford, has been at the conference since early Saturday. This afternoon she hosted a brunch attended by about 400 people, gave a strong speech, and stayed around for almost an hour for photographs with supporters.
Gawker has a story up detailing the potential "interest" of Mort Zuckerman, billionaire publisher of the NY Daily News in challenging Senator Kirsten Gillibrand From the NY Times:
Mr. Zuckerman regards Ms. Gillibrand as vulnerable to a challenge and is hoping that, at a time of economic tumult and political unrest, his background as an outsider to government, and his record as a business executive, will appeal to the state's electorate, these people said.
Of course, not for him to go through the messy primary process. If he runs, he'll run as a Republican.
Earlier this week, John Cook of Gawker asked the campaign of Harold Ford of Tennessee, Merrill Lynch, the DLC, NBC and the Park Avenue Regency whether Ford, despite living in Manhattan since 2007, had ever filed a state tax return.
Ford evidently claimed to work entirely out of Merrill Lynch's office in Nashville (where there is no income tax), and arranged to have his untold multi-million dollars in salary and bonuses paid there.
The campaign of Harold Ford of Tennessee, Merrill Lynch, the DLC, NBC and the Park Avenue Regency to replace the excellent Senator Kirsten Gillibrand will not end when he loses the Democratic primary in September.
Ford is clearly planning to run on the Independence Party line in November, as an "independent Democrat," like his good friend Joe LIEberman.
