Cover Story
Photo: William Dean Hinton
Nobody expected Bob Corker to win the battle of the shout-downs before the first debate of the U.S. Senate race, which was held at a television station in Memphis, home turf to Democratic Congressman Harold Ford Jr. With few Corker volunteers to jeer and rally against, Ford supporters bunched together on a dead-end street, next to his enormous tour bus, mingling among themselves and waiting for something to happen.
But it was a different story in Chattanooga, Corker’s home turf, three days later. Several hundred Corker supporters turned out, holding banners and placards, singing fight songs and trying to outdo the surprisingly large number of Ford supporters, who were in an equally pugnacious mood. Minutes before Corker arrived, at the height of the caterwauling, Ford’s side yelled in unison “Harold Ford” while Corker’s people shouted “Bob Corker” so that, if you were standing down the street from the ruckus, all you could hear was a great, big “Harold Corker.”
Inside an auditorium on the UT Chattanooga campus, where the second debate was held, Harold Corker turned out to be an apt description of the two candidates’ ideologies. They spent a lot of time pointing out how different they were with little net effect. After all, for years both have plumbed the same side of the conservative political spectrum: they’re both anti-abortion, anti-taxes, anti-immigrant, anti-gay marriage, pro-school prayer, pro-military spending, pro-education, pro-alternative fuels.
About the only difference between the two is that Corker is opposed to embryonic stem cell research, as opposed to adult stem cell research, which does not require the destruction of embryos (and potential human life). Ford, on the other hand, supports federal funding of both kinds of medical inquiry, calling a stem cell bill vetoed by President Bush last year a “pro-life” bill.
Issues aside, Corker, the pint-sized 54-year-old former mayor of Chattanooga and mega-rich real estate developer, and Ford, a 36-year-old congressman deemed to be this election season’s most gifted campaigner inside and outside Tennessee, were left to pick at old wounds. Ford, who started off the evening in stately terms, musing on events in Iraq and North Korea, hounded Corker, who has amassed a sizable fortune building strip malls, for failing to fire a subcontractor who employed illegal workers at a Corker construction site nearly 20 years ago. The allegation is at least as old as the Republican primary, during which Corker’s two opponents pointed out that hiring illegals would definitely be something Harold Ford Jr. would capitalize on during the general election. Corker responded by reiterating how little business sense Ford seemed to possess. “I couldn’t fire the subcontractor because I was bounded by something called a contract,” Corker said.
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When it was Corker’s turn to go on the offensive, he pretended to unwillingly unleash a firebomb. Harold Ford Jr. had received campaign contributions from the Fannie Mae mortgage organization, which employs Ford’s larger-than-life father, former Congressman Harold Ford Sr., as one of its lobbyists. Ford said he was “too decent of a person” to respond but added something he says often on the campaign trail, “I didn’t think [Corker] could stoop any lower.” That’s become Ford’s de facto response when confronted with inconvenient truths.
Corker’s revelation was humorous on several levels. For one, it wasn’t something Corker revealed in the heat of debate, as he seemed to indicate by saying, “I wasn’t going to bring this up tonight.” Immediately after the debate, his staff disseminated a 14-page “Fannie Mae Snapshot,” complete with newspaper quotes and Ford’s Fannie Mae voting history. It’s safe to say Corker’s attack was planned days, if not weeks, in advance. For another thing, Ford’s Fannie Mae issue has been in the media since at least June, when Knoxville News-Sentinel columnist Greg Johnson called Ford’s “coziness” with Fannie Mae administrators suspicious.
After the debate, Corker glad-handed supporters and exited stage right, where he found a television camera ready to accept his take on the evening. “I felt comfortable,” he said. “I felt I showed the differences in our styles, lifestyles and approaches to problem solving.” Problem solving, it should be noted, is the hallmark of Corker’s campaign. He likes to solve them, especially the “complex” kind. In that way, he sounds a lot like his good friend Gov. Phil Bredesen, who has played the good Democrat and publicly supported Ford in this general election.
Ford, meanwhile, was still inside the auditorium, surrounded by well wishers and autograph seekers. He prayed with a small circle of black men, arms hung around each other, heads bowed. He signed a Time magazine article, in which he was featured, for a middle-aged white woman. After taking a picture with a cute co-ed, Ford pointed toward the middle of the theater and asked, “Is that mom?” “What’s your last name,” he asked the mother. “Ms. Nelson? Nice to see you.” He signed a ticket to the debate for a young teacher who wanted to talk No Child Left Behind.
If the crowd around Ford—in Chattanooga, no less—was not enough proof of the strong reactions he creates, a better indicator might have been the goateed man standing with a couple of attorneys in the back row of the theater. “All I know is that if that guy gets elected, I’m moving out of Tennessee,” he said. The man indicated an urgent desire to speak with his company’s employees—several thousand workers, is the way he described them. “I want to make sure they vote the right way.” So it seems in this election, either you’re voting with Ford or you’re voting against him. Bob Corker has become, more or less, an afterthought.
Ford at Brighton High School’s Homecoming
Photo: William Dean Hinton
The way he tells it, Harold Ford Jr. was born to campaign. At the age of 4, his father, running in his first election for Congress, propped Junior (as he is nearly universally known) on a table at a radio station in midtown Memphis and hit the record button on a tape recorder. “I want better homes, better schools and better cookie prices” was the little Ford’s tagline.
Ford Sr. won the election, which meant Junior and his mother Dorothy were uprooted to Washington, along with two little brothers. Most of Junior’s life has been spent in the nation’s capital or in Philadelphia, where he earned a history degree at the University of Pennsylvania, or in Ann Arbor, where he went to law school.
The early part of Junior’s life, it seems, was nothing more than a placeholder, something to bide his time until he was old enough to run for office.
That much was in evidence early on, at the prestigious St. Albans school in D.C. where Junior was another in a long line of political progeny who would become St. Albans alumni: Jeb Bush, Al Gore Jr., Evan Bayh and Jesse Jackson Jr. among them. In the sixth grade, Ford was cast to play Malcolm, son of King Duncan, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Malcolm isn’t a particularly important character in the play—he has few lines, spending most of the play in exile, hiding from the tyrannical Macbeth. Even so, he’s one of the few characters who survives the play. Yet when it came time to perform, Junior had run off to Memphis with his father, campaigning. His lines had to be read by the stage manager. “Harold knew the real show was back in Memphis,” says David Plotz, a St. Albans classmate who now writes for Slate.com. “He knew where his future lay, with his family, in politics.”
Ford was a member of the school’s Government Club, usually debating the liberal side of issues such as the Cold War and Nicaragua Contra affair. Plotz says Junior had an obvious gift for debate and also for relationship building, especially if it led to a Ford advantage. In Mr. Brown’s math class, for example, Ford would buddy up with the smart kids in such a way as to make it look like each side was receiving maximum benefits. At the same time, Ford’s homework was completed with better than satisfactory results. “There was this constant sense of creating social artifice,” Plotz says. “It was partly out of genuine feeling, but there was always this anticipation how it would play out later on.”
After law school at the University of Michigan, Ford took the bar exam but failed, he says, because he was too busy campaigning for the congressional seat his father was vacating. Ford used a novel approach to campaigning. When he couldn’t find groups to speak to—voters don’t always want to hear from a 26-year-old political neophyte—he went to schools around the 9th District, most of which is urban Memphis, speaking to students much too young to vote.
During his run for the Senate, Ford still fills his schedule with school visits. Three weeks ago, he was the “very important person” who interrupted a homecoming obstacle race held in Brighton High School’s gym, a half-hour northeast of Memphis. Instead of being bored and restless, the Brighton students listened intently as Ford told them how important math and science classes were, how America needs more people to speak foreign languages, how the nation needs to save more money and how Ronald Reagan was a “brave and courageous” hero.
It was a dynamic, if somewhat safe, speech, which is what can be said about almost all Ford oratory. With the “young Brighton students,” as Ford put it, he was building relationships with tomorrow’s voters while creating no downside. Who doesn’t want more interpreters with which to defeat the terrorists? Who doesn’t want a plump savings account? And there’s certainly no risk in evoking a Republican’s name to the children of Democrats who quite possibly voted for Reagan.
Outside the gym, in the glaring sunlight, Ford oozes confidence. He alternates between placing his hands on his hips and folding them in front of his body. His strong jaw juts forward in a look of defiance. Today, only two members of the national media, from USA Today and the Chicago Tribune, are tagging along with him. (Before the week is over, he’ll face reporters from The New York Times, Newsweek, 700 Club, Baltimore Sun and CBS Evening News, whose correspondent marvels at a scripture-quoting Democrat. They chase Ford as he chases history, trying to become the first black senator from a Southern state since Reconstruction. The national media is also anticipating that the Ford-Corker race will decide whether Democrats take back the Senate, which they lost to the GOP in 2000.) When asked about the NRA’s endorsement of Corker, Ford snaps, “I’m not worried about what the national groups do.” When reporters ask about Republican criticism of him, Ford says it’s a reflection on how poorly Corker’s campaign is being run. “I feel sorry for his colleagues. They don’t have anything positive to say about their candidate. If my candidate was as bad as theirs, I’d probably say those things too.” When asked about polls showing him neck-and-neck with Corker, he responds, “I feel the momentum is growing in my favor. I feel it everywhere I go.”
Then, without waiting for a staffer to break off the session, he says abruptly, “We’re going to FedEx,” the next stop on the trip and, historically, a big Ford donor. “Y’all coming?”
Corker and Frist in Hendersonville
Photo: William Dean Hinton
Bob Corker consistently criticizes Harold Ford Jr. for being a career politician, but if Corker had his way, he would have become a Beltway insider two years before Ford took office. Corker was Bill Frist’s opponent in the 1994 race for the U.S. Senate seat that is now once again open. Frist, meanwhile, is presumably running for president. (He could be overheard at one Corker campaign event telling a female constituent that he’ll make a decision in two months, which means, more than likely, he is running.)
Two weeks ago, it was interesting to see Corker and Frist campaigning together at Hendersonville City Hall, not because of lingering animosity between the two, but to size up Corker next to a veteran politician other than Harold Ford. Corker is a likable sort: personable and amusing and eager to please. When a reporter repeats a question about Ford trying to link Corker to big oil, Corker responds to the question by repeating how little business sense Ford seems to possess, then steps closer to the reporter and asks, “Is that emphatic enough for you?”
Even Democrats like Corker. Bob Tuke, chairman of the state Democratic Party, hikes regularly with Corker and a small group of buddies in the Smokey Mountains. “Bob Corker is a good guy,” says Democratic Congressman Jim Cooper, who has campaigned with Ford almost nonstop for a year-and-a-half. “At another time, he’d be an awesome candidate. But his views on things like stem cell research shows he’s much too beholden to the right wing of his party. He’ll vote with the administration 99 percent of the time. He’ll be a Bush clone. And that’s not good for America.”
In Hendersonville, while Frist poses for photos in a mob near the parking lot, Corker is content to mingle with the crowd on the periphery, almost as if he were another guest. He doesn’t so much work the room as he does blend in. After his speech, a mother approaches with a child in a baby carriage. Corker sizes up the toddler and, not knowing what to do, shakes the kid by the knees, looking a bit awkward in the process.
During his introduction of Corker, Frist reiterates platitudes heard often from Republicans, but he does it in such a casual manner that they seem fresher than usual. “The contrast we have before us if very clear,” he says. Without mentioning Ford by name, Frist categorizes him as a pessimistic, backward-thinking, unprincipled obstructionist. He says Corker won’t “cut and run” out of Iraq like Ford, will seal the borders, will keep taxes low, will fight the trial lawyers and the “culture of Hollywood,” a phrase he likes so much he says it repeatedly.
Then Frist says he’s “passing the baton,” meaning his Senate seat, to Corker, who takes the podium and within minutes launches into the same up-by-the-bootstraps, biographical sketch he gives everywhere he stumps. Corker began working at 13 and, after attending the University of Tennessee, started a career as a building contractor using his Ford pickup truck as transportation and office; the backseat was where he kept his checkbook and finished his paperwork. Corker goes on to talk about missionary work in Haiti and forming a nonprofit that built low-income housing for 10,000 families. He leaves out the part about developing so much property in 18 states that he is now worth an estimated $35 million and owns a 30-room mansion in Chattanooga, called Annehaven, where he’s held fundraisers for such Republican luminaries as George and Barbara Bush. And he doesn’t talk a lot about briefly being former Gov. Don Sundquist’s finance commissioner, as Sundquist remains a persona non grata within GOP circles for his support of an income tax.
Corker says he enjoyed being mayor of Chattanooga, between 2001 and 2005, “more than anything in life.” But he was mayor for only one term, leaving himself open to criticism that he used the mayorship to build his résumé for the office he really coveted, Frist’s Senate seat. “He was put in place by the power structure,” says Leamon Pierce, one of the few Chattanooga city council members critical of Corker. “He came in here with the notion of running for the Senate. He needed a stepping stone because he had no political background.”
Pierce says that by the last year of Corker’s term, the mayor was hardly ever around, having abandoned his post for a run at the Senate. “The mayor was elected to serve four years, but he only served three,” Pierce says, adding that Todd Womack, Corker’s mayoral spokesman who is now communications director for the Corker campaign, ran the show in Corker’s absence. “Most of the council referred to Todd Womack as ‘mayor.’ ”
Corker, who is 5-foot-7, was known as a didactic administrator—his detractors call him “little tyrant” because of his diminutive stature and confident demeanor—the classic example of what happens when a CEO tries to run a government. Corker has been credited for continuing the development of the Chattanooga riverfront, begun in the early 1990s with the construction of the Tennessee Aquarium. Blending private and public money, Corker added a marina and pier, expanded some parks and built a walkway along the river.
How much of the development was because of Corker’s ingenuity and how much was already in place before he took office is a matter of dispute in Chattanooga. “He gets credit for raising a lot of money,” says Irvin Overton, a retired health care administrator who ran against Corker during the 2001 mayor’s race. “But he has a lot of money, so he knows people with money. He’s a developer, so you expect him to do well developing the riverfront. But he didn’t do as well developing the entire community. He could orchestrate rich Republicans, but he couldn’t bring together the minority community.”
Black residents in neighborhoods that have benefited from significant affordable housing because of Corker’s efforts beg to differ. But some black officials accuse Corker of neglecting the city’s impoverished west side and of running Jimmie Dotson, the city’s popular African American police chief, out of town. According to Deputy Chief Charles Cook, who was Dotson’s second in command, Corker took exception to a small contribution Dotson made to Overton’s campaign during the mayor’s race. (Overton says the amount was under $100 and was a gesture of friendship more than anything else.) Several months after Corker took office, he began putting “obstacles” in Dotson’s path to frustrate the chief into quitting, Cook says.
A deeply religious man, Dotson has been credited for moving Chattanooga’s police force toward community-based policing, a management strategy that puts more cops on the streets, fostering relationships with homeowners and businesses to make policing more proactive and less reactive. Community policing is the reason Chattanooga’s crime rate dropped, giving Corker bragging rights during the Senate race that he curtailed crime by 50 percent—numbers Deputy Chief Cook says are bogus. “Those numbers were never meant to be released to the public,” he says. “The numbers were a managerial tool. They didn’t mean much because we changed a lot of things, like computer programs and the way we reported crimes, that make the numbers misleading. Corker wanted to use the numbers because he was looking for a big press release showing he was eliminating crime.”
Dotson left the department in 2004 and Corker hired Larry Wallace, the former head of the TBI, to conduct a search for his replacement. (Corker spokesman Todd Womack says the Corker-Dotson parting was mutual.) After the six-week selection process ended, Corker pulled a surprise by recommending Wallace, much to the dissatisfaction of Chattanoogans who wanted qualified officers already employed by the police department and minority candidates to be considered. A week after accepting the job, Wallace backed out, saying he didn’t like the tone of the questions the city council was asking him before ratifying his appointment.
The way Corker handled Chief Dotson and the aftermath are among the reasons Chattanooga’s police and firefighters endorsed Ford. And it’s one of the examples Corker’s critics use when they point out how much of a political novice he is. They consider a well-publicized shake-up in Corker’s campaign staff immediately after he won the Republican primary as further evidence that he’s out of his league. Corker shrugged it off as a routine shake-up, but a major change among top campaign staff this close to the election is considered a bad sign, one that Ford capitalizes on every chance he gets, framing Corker’s campaign as chaotic and desperate. (Not to be outdone, Corker began using the same language to describe Ford’s campaign.) It hasn’t helped that the staff change coincided with poll numbers showing Corker losing ground to Ford, with some Democratic pundits now heckling Corker that Hamilton County, Corker’s home turf, could be in play in the Senate race. “It would be a drastic mistake for Bob Corker to underestimate Harold Ford Jr.,” says Stuart James, head of the Hamilton County Democratic Party.
“He’s slicker than owl shit,” Steve Steffens, a memphis Fedex employee, says of Ford.
Photo: ericengland.net
After Brighton High School, Ford delivers on his promise by leading reporters to the huge FedEx complex near the Memphis airport. As Junior gets out to chat up the female security guards and shake hands with truck drivers entering the complex, word comes down that FedEx managers won’t let his entourage inside. The unofficial explanation is that reporters in the group are not welcome at FedEx.
So Ford heads downtown to the Peabody Hotel for his next engagement, a speaking gig in the elegant ballroom on the hotel’s top floor with the Kiwanis Club of Memphis, most of whom are Republican, something Ford acknowledges when he walks to the podium. Turning to Kiwanis president Buss McCormick, he says, “I noticed you wore a tie with elephants on it. You could have chosen another tie.” The election-time humor seems to delight his audience.
Ford has already kissed and glad-handed everyone at their tables, and at the end of his speech he walks into the kitchen (with photographers running after him) to say hello to the kitchen staff. During speeches, Ford often gives quick asides to keep his audiences on their toes and to make points he might not get in otherwise. At the Kiwanis meeting, he points to the media contingent and the photographer snapping away at the podium. “The press wants to understand why people like you would vote for someone like me,” he says.
The topic he interrupts with his aside is the Iraq war, which he backed at first, believing President Bush had an exit plan in place. He now believes Iraq should be partitioned into three states, like Bosnia after the Croatian War, an idea Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware proposed in a May 1, 2005, speech in Philadelphia and a plan expected to be endorsed by a congressional commission chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker. Unlike Bosnia, Iraq under Biden’s plan would have one constitution but three autonomous regions divided by geography and ethnicity—Kurd, Sunni and Shiite. The central government, based in Baghdad, would be responsible for border defense, foreign policy, oil production and gathering taxes. Each region would receive a portion of the nation’s oil money.
But foreign policy experts don’t see value in treating dissimilar countries alike, or evidence that Iraqis themselves want to be divided into three separate regions. “The Iraqis are more nationalized than the Bosnians were,” says Danielle Pletka, of American Enterprise Institute, a nonpartisan D.C. think tank. “And the suggestion that what works for one set of ‘foreigners’ will work for all makes for bad foreign policy.”
Yet by proposing to partition Iraq, Ford first and foremost avoids looking like a cut-and-run Democrat, as Sen. Frist calls him. It also allows him to triangulate into Republican territory, in this case foreign policy, by seeking a third way—not quite Democrat, not quite Republican, but somewhere in between. Triangulation is, of course, nothing new. Bill Clinton triangulated on welfare reform in the mid-1990s, for example, by placing restrictions on what was typically thought to be an untouchable Democrat handout.
Triangulation is the main reason Corker has failed miserably in labeling Ford a liberal. During his 10 years in office, Ford’s voting record has been suspiciously centrist, even for someone whose ambitions probably lie beyond the Senate. Neither conservatives nor liberals claim him. He’s consistently voted for increased military spending and for balanced budgets. He’s voted against partial birth abortions every chance he’s had, even voting for a failed attempt to override President Clinton’s veto of a bill that would have given a two-year jail term to abortion providers who performed a procedure known as dilation and evacuation, in which a pair of scissors is inserted into the skull of a fetus and the brain is drained before the baby is delivered vaginally.
He also has been at odds with the Congressional Black Caucus over issues such as privatizing Social Security and reforming bankruptcy laws. Two years ago, Ford flirted with the idea to offer personal savings accounts either to augment Social Security or to replace it—the idea wasn’t fully formulated. “I don’t think the government is an insurance program,” Ford told the Scene in 2004, when he also told this newspaper that he had “no real [political] philosophy.” As President Bush’s popularity declined with the fortunes of Iraq, along with his ability to lobby for a conservative agenda that included privatization, Ford began pushing for a less controversial measure, funding personal savings accounts for every baby born after Dec. 31, 2006, which would, if passed, cost American taxpayers nearly $7 billion annually.
Bankruptcy reform has been a thorny issue for Ford. His largest congressional contributors have been banks and finance companies, but Memphis traditionally has had one of the highest rates of bankruptcy filings in the country. To some Memphis residents, Ford’s vote for the bankruptcy bill last year, which made it more difficult for filers to walk away from debt by filing the more lenient Chapter 7 (as opposed to Chapter 13, which forces debtors to abide by a payment program), looked like he’d been bought and sold by credit card companies.
“Ford is a dangerous sellout who is willing to do or say anything to achieve power,” wrote Memphis blogger Skeptical Brotha. “He already sold out his grandmamma and his constituents. The rest of the black community will be next.”
According to University of California-San Diego economist Michelle White, who published an op-ed piece in The Washington Post about the effects of bankruptcy reform, the act still provides enough loopholes for opportunists to gang the system while discouraging those who truly need bankruptcy protection from filing. She predicts “more debtors will be subject to wage garnishment, some will quit their jobs to avoid repaying and some will drastically cut their consumption level in order to repay.”
If bankruptcy is a wash for Ford, several other ideas he tosses out to the Kiwanis make even less sense. Ford is big on alternative fuels because, as he says, America is funding both sides of the war on terror as Mideast oil money inevitably trickles down to terrorist cells. His solution is two-fold: he wants the federal government to begin hybridizing its fleet of automobiles, swapping gas-guzzlers for the more pricey gas-electric hybrid cars preferred by West Coast environmental geeks. (To be fair, Nashville’s Metro government owns three hybrids.) The cost of a hybrid is $8,000 more than a car of similar size and capacity, a cost that cannot be made up by increased gas mileage during the life of the car. But Junior says the hybrid price will drop once more hybrids are in demand. It’s the old economies-of-mass-scale argument. “We can create a market,” he says.
Not so, says Dave Cole of the Center for Automotive Research, which is affiliated with the University of Michigan and U.S. Army. Cole says politicians routinely make the mistake of saying the price of hybrids will drop long-term. But, to borrow a phrase popular right now, the price is what it is, mainly because of the hybrid’s increased cost of electrical connections, an extra mechanical system and nickel-metal-hydride batteries. “It’s great technology but expensive,” Cole says. He anticipates the price of hybrids would drop no more than a few hundred dollars even if their production increased tenfold. “That’s the misconception with high volume,” he says.
Ford’s other clunker is his insistence on backing ethanol and biodiesel as a solution to America’s energy problems. “Wouldn’t it be great if America could grow its way out of its dependence on oil?” Junior asks again and again on the stump. Ethanol has already been debunked countless times, most recently in the November issue of Harper’s in a story about how Beltway interests have co-opted the liberal politics of Barack Obama, the black Illinois senator whose oratory gifts, if not campaign talents, exceed Junior’s. (Obama thinks enough of Ford to have donated $7,000 from his leadership PAC, Hopefund, to Ford’s Senate campaign.) “It is beyond dispute that [ethanol] survives only because members of Congress from farm states, whether liberal or conservative, have for decades managed to win billions of dollars in federal subsidies to underwrite its production,” writes Ken Silverstein, Harper’s political editor. “It is not, of course, family farmers who benefit from the program but rather the agribusiness giants such as Illinois-based Aventine Renewable Energy and Archer Daniels Midland.”
It goes without saying that corn has never been a major staple of Tennessee agriculture. By advocating ethanol, Ford is probably doing nothing more harmful than being a good Democrat. “It stands to really expand the Democratic electoral base into grain producing states,” says Marcus Pohlmann, a Rhodes College political scientist anticipating a Ford victory on Election Day. “Iowa is already licking its lips.” And a politician with Ford’s ambition might need Iowa Caucus voters for his own purposes sometime during the next decade.
“Problem-solving” is the hallmark of Corker’s message.
Photo: William Dean Hinton
Even before the Republican primary ended, Bob Corker and the rest of the Republicans tried to paint Ford as a liberal. But because his record is all over the map, and because the congressman votes to the right on issues such as religion, guns and the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, the label hasn’t stuck in any meaningful way.
Corker’s backup position is to make Ford seem ethically challenged. Early on, Corker tried to counter the now-famous ad showing Junior in church asking for voters’ prayers, by pointing out that Ford had attended a Superbowl party attended by Playboy bunnies and by releasing information showing Ford paid for Armani suits and expensive hotels out of his campaign funds. The Republican National Committee and a group calling itself the Free Enterprise Fund, which sees itself as a conservative version of Moveon.org, have run ads pointing out Junior’s extravagant tastes. (Ford would have to dip into political money for such indulgences, as his net worth, according to opensecrets.org, is no more than $155,000.) The allegations of Armani suits and Four Seasons hotel rooms are based on two articles in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, dating to 2000 and 2005, in which Ford was outed for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars from his campaign stash even though he didn’t have a formidable opponent running in the 9th District. The same articles pointed out that GOP congressmen, like Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, also spent gobs of money even though they didn’t have opponents and said federal election laws place few restraints on spending from campaign accounts, though Ford’s campaign did previously agree he had to pay back $2,550 for an Armani suit he bought to wear for the keynote speech he gave at the 2000 Democratic convention.
But in these last days of the campaign, Corker, up two points in the latest polling, hasn’t needed much firepower against Ford. During his now infamous “Memphis meltdown” episode—when Ford showed up to confront his opponent at Corker’s own press conference—and during a joint appearance with Corker on CNN—when Ford came off as angry and petulant—the Memphis congressman has been his own worst enemy. The episodes have made Ford’s notorious temper an issue for voters.
Meanwhile, also in the last days of the campaign, Corker has done something he said in August he would never do: attack Ford’s family. The attacks have thus far been weak and ineffective—Corker isn’t adept at being his own hatchet man—but the notoriously corrupt Ford family is a major concern to Junior’s campaign staff, who worry the “echo chamber” of the media repeating Ford family transgressions will stymie his chance at the Senate.
The echo sounds something like this: the Ford “machine,” as Corker called it during his first debate with Junior, began with Ford’s grandfather, funeral director N.J. Ford, hosting Sunday political dinners in which dozens of relatives attended. Eventually, seven of N.J. Ford’s children would hold political office at one time or another. Three of them—Harold Sr., Emmitt and John—would be indicted and one, ophthalmologist James, would die in office.
Emmitt Ford was an insurance agent and state representative whom a federal jury convicted in 1980 of trying to defraud 20 insurance companies out of $54,000 by filing phony hit-and-run reports. Emmitt Ford actually won reelection after the conviction but was forced to resign by then-House Speaker Ned McWherter. He threatened to run for the statehouse again but never did. In October 1999, Emmitt was back in federal court, this time pleading guilty to failing to file tax returns even though he’d earned more than $700,000 in the two-year period for which he was under investigation. He served nearly two years in a federal penitentiary for that crime.
After two trials, a mostly white jury found Junior’s father, Harold Ford Sr., not guilty in 1993 of 18 counts of conspiracy, bank and mail fraud for accepting what prosecutors claimed was $1.2 million in bogus loans given to him by banker Jake Butcher in return for Ford delivering votes for Butcher’s unsuccessful gubernatorial bid in 1978. At the time of his two trials, Ford claimed prosecutors were racists, liars and cowards. Attorneys on both sides in Ford’s second trial were so worried there would be rioting in Memphis if Ford was found guilty that they asked the judge to postpone the jury’s verdict until after Martin Luther King Day. Ford Sr. now lives in Miami with a second family that includes two small children.
But the real loose screw in the family is John Ford, whom other members of the family have tried to distance themselves from. The warning signs were apparent early on: in 1974, John Ford told a fellow city council member to “go to hell.” Her crime? She dared to tell John Ford he’d parked across two parking spaces outside City Hall. In 1990, John Ford, by then a state senator, was tried and acquitted of shooting at a Dallas truck driver. In 1996, he was found guilty of sexually harassing an employee while he was Shelby County General Sessions clerk. In 1997, Ford agreed to enter a diversion program after waving a shotgun at utility workers he wanted off his property. In 2000, The Commercial Appeal published a transcript of Ford using 68 curse words during a short conversation with reporter Marc Perrusquia as Perrusquia questioned him about an allegation that he tried to limit the scope of an audit of a nonprofit that controlled millions of public dollars for children’s day care services. And last spring, John Ford was one of five state lawmakers indicted in the Tennessee Waltz sting. Ford, who resigned from the state Senate, has been accused of taking $55,000 to help a fake electronics company called E-Cycle Management pass bills in the state legislature. One of his attorneys said Ford would be cleared of charges by the end of this year. But his trial has been moved to February to avoid election season. John Ford also has a second family he lives with in Memphis.
And finally, Junior’s Aunt Ophelia won a special election to replace brother John in the state Senate. But lawmakers voided her election after irregularities surfaced that felons, nonresidents and dead people had cast votes for her. Ophelia Ford has vowed to fight on. She coasted to victory in the August primary and is expected to return to the Senate next spring.
To all of this background, Junior says the same thing: “I love my family.” Sometimes he makes a joke as if to say everybody has a few wing nuts in their families. At the end of some speeches, he asks for people’s vote by saying, “Send me to the Senate and I will make you proud.” Given his family’s history, the request resonates more coming off Junior’s lips than it would another candidate’s.
Nobody knows how much of an adverse effect the Ford family will have on the race until after Election Day. “Harold Ford Jr. has two negatives running in the South,” says Jennifer Duffy of the Cook Political Report. “One is that he’s African American. The other is his family history. He can’t do anything about being black, so he’s trying his best to inoculate himself against his family.”
As conservative Tennesseeans sort out whom they’ll vote for, the few liberals in the state seem to have no choice. Either vote for Junior or stay home. “He’s slicker than owl shit,” says Steve Steffens, a FedEx employee who writes a political blog in Memphis. “He’s 90 percent style and 10 percent substance. If you see him speak in public, you get mesmerized by him. Then you find out more about him. ‘He voted on what? Who is this guy?’ ”
Steffens is among those who don’t appreciate how Junior is handling the race to replace the congressional office he’s vacating. Junior’s brother Jake belatedly entered the race as an Independent running against Democratic state Sen. Steve Cohen, an attorney whose wit and candor would be as rare in Congress as it has been at the statehouse. Jake, a high school dropout, has a criminal past that includes smoking pot and beating up Harold Ford Sr. During his truncated campaign, Jake, now known around Memphis as “Joke Ford,” managed to make the second stupidest comment of the election season, when he dismissed Junior as a “prima donna” and told the Memphis Flyer, “I’m the one who inherited my father’s political sense, my brother Isaac is the one who got the business sense and all Harold got was the name.”
The stupidest comment of the season? That would belong to Harold Ford Sr., who, in endorsing his son (whom he inexplicably called Jake Ford Jr.) during a chicken-dinner rally Oct. 15, managed to besmirch Cohen’s name with baseless fearmongering. “Now, Jake Ford Jr. is the man you need. And I promise you that Jake Ford Jr., he don’t believe in no same-sex marriages. We’re from a Christian city here. He doesn’t believe in legalizing marijuana. This man that’s running against Jake wants some same-sex shops running in downtown Memphis on Sunday.”
Ford Sr. didn’t have to make the comments, much less endorse Joke Ford Jr. He didn’t even endorse his own brother, John, during a county mayor’s race in the early 1990s, choosing to back Republican Jack Sammons instead. But then, if Joke Ford loses, the Fords will lose the patronage of the 9th District seat for the first time since Gerald Ford was president. So there is hope come election night, even if that hope has nothing to do with Bob Corker or Harold Ford Jr.