WP op-ed: This Year's Southern Prodigy: Harold Ford is a sight to behold.

[DeepModem Mom]

This Year's Southern Prodigy
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, August 23, 2006; Page A15


Rep. Harold Ford Jr. (Mark Humphrey - AP)

....Several hundred Murfreesboro Democrats, a clear majority of them white, had come out on a brutally hot morning to hear Harold Ford Jr. -- the 36-year-old congressman from Memphis who is the Democratic nominee for the Senate seat that Bill Frist is vacating. To recapture the Senate this year, the Democrats need Ford to take Tennessee -- no small challenge, since Tennessee hasn't sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1990, and since Ford, like just 16 percent of his fellow Tennesseans, is African American.

Yet Ford is still very much in the hunt, and after just a few minutes in his presence, it's no mystery why: He is, in the tradition of Southern pols ranging from Huey Long to Bill Clinton, a preternaturally gifted campaigner. Young, single, handsome in a way that pols almost never are (he is the only elected official I've ever seen who could have a successful career as a model), blessed with a perfect ear for both political argument and the exigencies of local politics, Ford is a sight to behold.

Consider the following Ford attack on the Republicans' national security bona fides. "When we fill up our gas tanks, we send money to the other side in the war on terrorism -- Iran," he tells the crowd. "Think of Iran as a venture capital company that invests in an unusual kind of start-up -- terrorist organizations. It's a big venture capital fund, and who's its biggest investor? You are. Yet our government does nothing to fund alternative sources of energy," he says, noting that his campaign car is powered by biodiesel fuels and arguing that Tennessee's economy could profit if the federal government had the horse sense to promote hybrid cars and alternative fuels.

Ford seems to have been readying himself for this race for virtually his entire life. The son of a longtime congressman from Memphis -- home to the state's only majority-black congressional district -- Ford succeeded his father in that seat 10 years ago at the tender age of 26. His voting record is much more that of a pol planning to run statewide in a conservative state than it is of a House member from a heavily black and Democratic district....Plainly, Ford is no Tennessee populist in the tradition of the original Albert Gore -- or the original Andrew Jackson. Far from warring on the banks, Ford is a member of the capital markets subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee, and he has raised a fat chunk of change from Wall Street. The liberals I spoke with at his events this past weekend certainly weren't thrilled by all his positions. They were thrilled, however, by the emergence of a candidate with a Clintonian ability to deflect Republican attacks -- and by the prospect of their state electing a senator who is young, gifted and black....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/22/AR2006082200977.html

[Stinky The Clown]

1. The right man at the right time in the right place

His politics and mine don't align all that much. But I am enthuisatic for him. I've lived in both Chattanooga and Memphis, in the late 70s. I honestly think this man can do it.

Much like Jim Webb is the right man in the right place at the right time in Virginia. Again, my politics and his may not meet all that much, but for him, too, I am enthusiastic.

Both of these states really **want** to be blue. It will take only the right candidate to do it. I think we have an excellent chance in both cases.

Most promising is the recent poll showing Mr. Ford slightly ahead of Republican and Swamp-Land-Salesman-to-WalMart Bob Corker.

With Webb within 5 of Allen, thngs in the Senate as well as the House could be changing soon.