Monday, January 19, 2009
Politics / Woods Harold Ford Jr.'s Daisy-Plucking Ways
Posted by Jeff Woods on Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 6:40 AM
My altweekly counterpart in Memphis, the ubiquitous Jackson Baker, agrees that Harold Ford Jr. is holding the Democratic Party hostage by refusing to say whether he'll run for governor. Baker points out Ford did the same thing in 2000 with a "highly dilatory, daisy-plucking dalliance with the idea of running for the Senate against then incumbent Bill Frist," and he predicts the same outcome this time:
"One hitch has been uncertainty about Ford's commitment to a full-time presence in Tennessee. He has maintained a Memphis residence but is basically an occasional visitor here, splitting the better part of his time between Nashville, Washington, and New York. And there has always been serious doubt among those who know Ford best about his appetite for A) overseeing the kind of nuts-and-bolts administration that being a governor requires; and B) confining himself to the Tennessee landscape."
