'Race was not a factor', Democrat Ford insists
KNOXVILLE, Tennessee — Democratic Congressman Harold Ford Jr. said yesterday on a tour to thank his political supporters that his race was not a critical factor in the narrow loss in his bid for a Senate seat and that he was looking ahead to more campaigns.“I was born how I was and I just ran the best race I could,” said Ford, who would have become the South’s first black senator in more than a century if he had defeated Republican Bob Corker.
“I have no regrets at all,” the Memphis Democrat said. “I am more thankful than anything that so many people across this great state gave me a chance to share my views, and I am even more thankful that they allowed me to listen to them.”
Ford, 36, said that after his statewide tour and a few days’ rest, he will return to Washington to finish off the last two months of his congressional term, then take stock of his political future.
“I don’t think God is through with me yet in terms of politics. I will just go where he guides me,” Ford said.
Corker defeated Ford by 51 percent to 48 percent on Tuesday to fill the seat of retiring Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist, who is considering a run for president in 2008.
“Lots of people have claimed that race is the reason that Harold Ford lost,” Vanderbilt University political scientist John Geer said. “That may be true, but I think it is premature and I think it also potentially cheapens Corker’s victory.”
An exit poll produced for The Associated Press and the television networks said a solid 40 percent of white voters in Tennessee voted for Ford, along with 95 percent of the state’s black voters. Blacks are 13 percent of Tennessee voters, and 17 percent of the state population.
Political scientists interviewed yesterday offered several factors.
“It is not just race,” said Larry Sabato, a national political analyst at the University of Virginia. “It is a factor, of course. It is a factor in every state.”
But Sabato said, “I think Ford’s downfall was something that you couldn’t control — his family. His family has had a lot of corruption in its history.”
Ford comes from a powerful political family touched by scandal, including a congressman father tried and acquitted on bank fraud charges, an uncle who resigned from the Tennessee House after an insurance fraud conviction and another uncle who resigned from the state Senate last year after being charged with taking bribes.
“Imagine an African-American candidate with Harold Ford’s talent but not necessarily tied to the problems of his family,” Geer said. “He might have won.”
Ford only commented on one aspect of the campaign that had racial overtones. It was a Republican TV ad featuring a young white woman who looks seductively into the camera and says, “Harold, call me.” The ad was taken down after both Ford and Corker complained.
“You would have to ask those people that put that together, did they have any other intent?” Ford said. “I didn’t see that (as a race issue). I thought they were just full of smut.”
Critics said the ad was an attempt to play on deep-seated racial fears about black men and white women, but Pohlmann said it may have had a different effect.
