« The Daily Memo - 10/26/06 | Main | On-field drubbing leads to…uhm..off-field drubbing »
I Like Football and Girls!
There has been some inexplicable controversy surrounding Democratic Rep. Harold Ford’s run for Senate in Tennessee. First of all, the race against Republican Bob Corker for Bill Frist’s open seat is turning into a much closer contest than anyone expected. Ford is young (having entered Congress in 1996, right after graduating from law school) and he’s black, and no black person has been elected to the Senate in the South since reconstruction.
Nevertheless, the latest polls show a tight race. So, the Republicans got it into their head that the best way to smear Ford was to accuse him of attending a Playboy party, in order to call into question his faith (apparently, the GOP thinks that naked breasts and God are mutually exclusive). The Republican National Committee even ran a pretty nasty ad against Ford, basically suggesting all sorts of things about his character and his politics, ending the ad with a white woman demurely asking him to call her — implying that the single Ford only dates white women (in an effort, I can only guess, to alienate the black vote in Tennessee). Ford, being the naive, inexperienced politician that he is, initially denied having ever attended a Playboy Super Bowl party on last week’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
But earlier this week, Harold Ford finally recognized the value of having attended a Playboy Super Bowl party, and retracted his statement, saying: “I was there. I like football and I like girls. And I make no apologies for that.” And I say to Mr. Ford: Hoo-rah! That statement alone may win Harold the Senate seat in Tennessee. I haven’t spent a lot of time in the state myself, but I did grow up in the South, and as far as I can recollect, Southern men appreciate nothing more than football and women. That’s a sentiment basically every single male demographic can relate to, from farmers to car salesmen to corporate drones. Even Republicans (save for Mark Foley) like women and football! Hell, you throw a beer (and maybe twins) into that equation, Harold, and you’ve got yourself a freakin’ landslide.
That’s politics, baby! Suck it, Corker.
