Fancy Ford and Dreadful Dole

March 10, 2006

Rep. Harold Ford (D-Tenn.) is running a fairly competitive Senate campaign in Tennessee, though recent polls show him trailing a bit against the three Republicans running for the state’s open seat (Bill Frist is retiring).

Ford, however, clearly has made the Republicans a little nervous. Ford hit the airwaves recently, for example, incorporating the controversy surrounding the Dubai Ports World deal into his Senate campaign advertising. A week later, Republicans have responded with this: Fancy Ford.

The site, created by Sen. Elizabeth Dole’s (R-N.C.) National Republican Senatorial Committee, refers to the Dem candidate as “Fancy Ford” and includes pictures of Ford and expensive restaurants, hotels, cigars, meals, and Playboy bunnies. Ford is African American — and the Playboy bunnies are all white.

Depending on your perspective, Dole’s smear is either a subtle or direct form of character assassination. As Jesse Berney and Jason Zengerle noted, the NRSC is basically portraying Ford as a black pimp.

If only Dole and the NSRC were capable of feeling shame.

Post Script: For that matter, it’s March and already the NSRC is dabbling in racism. If these guys are this desperate now, I shudder to think about what they’ll stoop to in October.

It really is very embarrassing to be an American these days. Nothing but children running the show, particularly in the GOP.

  • If they’re stooping so low now, it can only be because that’s all they have left in the tank. And it could get really old by election day. We hope.

  • Add in Dole’s fundraising letters designed to look just like IRS forms, basically threatening folks if they don’t pony up–conveniently just before tax time–and they really are scared.

  • This is really sad, I really like Ford and hope that he wins this race. He was quoted in a newsweek article some years ago about being a black leader, and he dismissed it by saying he is just a leader period that he represents blacks and whites. I thought that was a very thoughtful answer, and really went a long way in my book.

  • I have looked at http://www.fec.gov (cited as source in racist anti-ford webpage) and I cannot find the figures cited as expenses. Could someone please point me to the right(?) page?

    What’s really funny is that they are calling Ford fancy for spending $3000 on 60 meals at the house dining room while Frist is flying around on drug pushers private jets.

  • I looked at the ‘Dine Like Ford’ page. It mentions how he eats at the exclusive and expensive restaurant named ‘Signatures’. Isn’t that Abramoff’s restaurant? I just read how it’s basically the Rethug lunchroom cafeteria. Can they use their own restaurant as a slam? I don’t get it.

  • I’d hate to be a traditional Republican these days. When I was in college (late ’50s) “the party of Lincoln” stood for racial equality and the Dems had the “Solid South” to drag around. Once LBJ signed the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, the bigots all slithered over to the GOP and have become, if anything, more virulent ever since. Now they’re internationalist (wars of conquest, crusades) and spendthrift (trillion dollar deficits) on top of being race bigots. I don’t see how traditional Republicans can stand to look at themselves in a mirror or admit to their children their party affiliation.

  • It sure invites a timely response ad from Ford….” so YOU republicans want to call ME fancy? ” and then a cinematic montage of republican criminal excess”.. Here’s the record on congressional reform by the party that is calling me out on ethics.

    A good time for the dems to establish that they are scrappers and will counterpunch when hit below the belt.
    Hit back hard…… right at the beginning of a smut campaign… before the image gets a chance to stick unchallenged in the electorate. What the hell, throw in some twilight zone music while we’re at it.

  • Wow. What a bunch of fucking hypocrites. This is so racist it makes your head spin. How can they seriously put this out there????

  • Not only is it racist, but they also engage in the “class warfare tactics” that Rethugs typically denounce. What a frikkin’ joke.

  • The South has always been about wars of conquest, as well as racism, going back to the foundation of the “traditional South” when the Barbadian pirates dropped anchor in Charleston Harbor in 1715 after being kicked out of Barbados by His Majesty’s Government. Since then, the avaricious, rapacious worldview of a pirate has been that of the South. It was these people who turned black slaves into non-human property and promoted white supremacy. You will notice that, while many Native American tribes managed to stay in their ancestral areas in the North (Iroquois, etc.), it was in the South that they were run off (the Cherokee) to allow the whites to steal what they had created. It was the South that consistently saw Manifest Destiny in terms of Wars of Conquest – the West, Mexico, Spain, etc. This is the worldview of a pirate. Had the Confederacy won the Civil War, they planned to conquer Mexico, Central and South America and establish a slaveocracy over those countries. There is nothing the South has created for the United States (other than black culture, which happend in spite of them) that has been anything but the complete opposite of the “American Ideal.”

    Quite frankly, all this “romantic” view of the South is nothing but 140 years of propaganda. It’s too bad that great traitor Robert E. Lee wasn’t hanged, drawn and quartered in 1865.

  • Horrible website. But, what kind of Democrat has Ford ever been anyway. I’ve never been able to stand that guy. They got one thing right, he is all style over substance. Point to one progressive or risky thing that guy ever did.

  • So what exactly are the racist components of the site? Hmm.

    1. The playboy bunnies are all white.
    2. The word “fancy” has an undertone that rubs me the wrong way, but I can’t put my finger on exactly why.

    But what else? Lets say that the GOP put together a comparable site to lambast a white Democrat for comparable excesses. Lets even set aside the question of whether the excesses are actual or imagined — such is politics. Exactly how is this site different from the above hypothetical attack on a white Dem?

  • The irony is rich. After Tom Delay’s golf junkets to Scotland that cost 10’s of $1,000’s of dollars, the Republicans have the audacity to finger someone for semi-lavish living.

  • It’s racist because they chose him, and not one of the 434 other people they likely could have chosen. Do you really think that any of the things they atrribute to him on this site could not be said about just about any congressman? Why did they choose to make an entire website out of the guy, huh? Because they know it will play better with their base if it’s a black man. It’s a subtle play of the race card, and in case you missed it Scott, subtle is the way it’s played nowadays unless you want to end up getting ballbusted for it. Why do you think the first link on the top menu starts with a story about a black rapper and not any other party he might have went to, huh? The fact that the site is absolutely hypocritical just makes it so much worse.

  • Frist would beat Ford in a fancy-off contest any day….. in a comparison of
    lifestyles of the rich and powerful. Talk about living in glass houses and throwing stones.. Is this a mudslinging battle that the repubs really want to start?

  • If they want to talk about pompous elitism and the Tennessee Senate seat, they should pick up a copy of Frist’s biography, “Good People Beget Good People.”

  • OK for a party suposedly interested in “reachng out” to Affrican Americans – this was a spectacularly bad idea. They have the committee run by the white female Senator from North Carolina basically equating a sitting Member of the House of Representatives to a pimp. Did no one on the staff think this was a bad idea?

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