A Profile of Harold Ford, Jr.

The son of a former congressman who represented Tennessee’s 9th District for 22 years, Harold Ford Jr. was elected to replace his father in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1996. He was re-elected four times – twice unopposed – by landslide margins in the heavily Democratic and majority black district. In 2006, Ford chose to run for an open Senate seat, but lost to Republican Bob Corker by 2.7%.

After losing to Corker, Ford was mentioned as a possible Senate candidate in Tennessee in 2008 and New York in 2010. However, he declined to enter either race, preferring to remain in the private sector where he worked for Morgan Stanley and PNC Bank. Ford has also served as a political commentator for CNN, NBC, CNBC, and MSNBC. He is currently under contract with FOX News where he appears frequently on Special Report and regularly on The Five.

Ford, who earned a B.A. in American history at the University of Pennsylvania before obtaining his law degree at the University of Michigan, has also taught at several colleges including Vanderbilt, the University of Texas, the University of Michigan, and NYU. He and his wife Carolina have two children.

OK, now that the biographical preliminaries are out of the way, let’s look at Ford’s congressional voting record. In 1999, he voted for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. As a result of the new law, investment banks were permitted to also operate as commercial banks and insurance companies, a combination that contributed to the 2007 financial crisis.

In 2002, Ford was one of 81 Democrats who voted in favor of the Iraq War. During his tenure in Congress, Ford supported gay adoption and universal healthcare while opposing the death penalty and oil drilling on federal land in Alaska. As a congressman, Ford also sought to reform existing federal drug policy.

So, why take the time to profile a somewhat moderate Democrat like Ford? Because he is one of the last of a dying breed. Whereas I do not agree with many of Ford’s positions, he comes across as someone who didn’t cast his votes arbitrarily. Instead, just like he does on The Five, Ford appears to look at issues from every angle before drawing a conclusion.

Refreshingly, Ford doesn’t rant and rave like Chuck Schumer and AOC, or demonize someone with whom he disagrees. On the contrary, he generally speaks in measured tones and refrains from using inflammatory language. A rare exception occurred in November 2005 when Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH) accused Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) of being a “coward” for supporting the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Murtha was a decorated Marine and Ford rightfully took exception to Schmidt’s comments, charging across the House chambers to challenge her remarks.

More than once, I have heard Ford criticize members of his own party as well as the Democratic platform itself. Of course, there are other times when he tows the party line, but not because he is being coerced to do so. On those occasions, he simply agrees with the Democratic position... period.

Like I said, I usually don’t agree with Ford’s conclusions, but I cannot fault his decision-making process. At the risk of sounding naïve, I think Harold Ford, Jr. can be reasoned with and even swayed by an intelligent and rational argument. In other words, he is not a rigid ideologue like so many of his previous colleagues in the Democratic caucus. Perhaps that is why he was chosen as the last chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, a nonprofit corporation formed in 1985 after Walter Mondale’s landslide loss to Ronald Reagan. The DCL’s stated goal was to shift away from the leftward turn the party had taken since the late 1960s.

Among the DLC’s founding members were Bruce Babbitt (AZ), Lawton Chiles (FL), Dick Gephardt (MO), Sam Nunn (GA), and Chuck Robb (VA)… none of whom would be at home in today’s Democrat Party. The same goes for Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a moderate Democrat who founded the Coalition for a Democratic Majority after Richard Nixon’s landslide victory over George McGovern in 1972.

Oh, how I long for the days when legislators could discuss issues reasonably, rationally, and responsibly without resorting to grandstanding and gratuitous name-calling.

David Davenport wrote a seminal piece on this very subject for Forbes magazine in 2018. Here are a few excerpts…

“It is not difficult to identify ‘lost arts’ – things we used to do but do not do any longer – in Washington, DC: civility, bipartisanship, courage, just to name a few. But one lost art underlies the others and has led to the inability of Congress to carry out its most basic responsibilities--pass a budget or keep the government open. The most fundamental lost art of all is the lost art of compromise.”

To his credit, Davenport used American history to bolster his argument. “Compromise includes the root ‘com’ which means together and ‘promise,’ he wrote. “The idea is that we learn to make promises based upon agreement, or coming together. Starting at the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787, our entire government is based on compromise. We had the Connecticut compromise, for example, which was based on the novel idea that the government could be partly federal and partly state-based. James Madison, recognized as the author of the Constitution, introduced several ideas that he could not get through the Convention, but which he compromised into something else.”

My friends, if indeed “Politics is the art of the possible,” as Otto von Bismarck famously said, then we need to adopt the approach advocated by Scoop Jackson and demonstrated by Harold Ford, Jr.

As Davenport put it, “…compromise seeks the ‘best possible’ solution. Not a perfect union but, as the preamble to the Constitution states, ‘a more perfect union.’”

Something tells me that - if Harold Ford and I were both serving in Congress at the same time - we would not only be able to work together on behalf of the American people and the greater good, but we'd also be friends.