Nashville News Blog

Harold Ford thinks there's a certain segment of Tennesseans who wouldn't accept his wife. Perhaps the kind of Tennesseans who would pose with a Confederate flag?

​Harold Ford Jr. continues to sell out the state that, just a few months ago, he thought he might want to serve as governor. He sat down with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times and made it as clear as he could that a vote for him is basically a vote against all the things that caused him to flee Tennessee for New York.

Even though he still keeps a residence here.

You see, apparently we're just dumb, ignorant assholes. Sadly for Ford, we're not so dumb or ignorant that we can't, oh, you know, read the New York Times and see what he says about us.

First, he hates us because he doesn't think we'd ever accept his wife.

There was so much bad racial stuff out of Tennessee on Obama. I'm in an interracial marriage. I don't want to subject my wife to this, and I want to start a family. I think my marriage is more accepted here than it would be in Tennessee.

The disingenuousness of this is almost funny. Not just because he still has a residence in Tennessee, but because, really, after all he went through in his senatorial campaign, it was the bad stuff about Obama that caused him to want to move to New York?

Not buying it.

Also, I grew up in the north. I have spent time in New York, both the city and upstate. Guess what?

The north is also full of scary, racist assholes. It's full of towns where it is still not safe for black people to live. And it's full of places where interracial couples are still considered strange and unseemly. It's full of scary conservatives on par with the worst of what we have down here.

People, New York brought us Stacey Campfield. Need I say more?

And, just like in the South, it's also full of good people who don't care who you marry.

Which Harold Ford damn well knows. But will that stop him from playing to northern prejudices against Tennessee? Of course not.

And then he takes a shot at Tennessee preachers

There were pastors in my Tennessee district who said you can minister to someone and change their sexual orientation. I just never accepted that.

But Ford himself was against gay marriage before he was for it, so just what, exactly, he wasn't accepting about what those preachers were saying is hard to tell.

New York, can we talk for a second, just girl-to-state?

New York, it's like this. Imagine you were dating a brash, handsome, charming fellow from Memphis, delightful in every way. You're starting to really fall in love.

And so you asked him about his last relationship. He tells you he has an ex-wife. A doozy of an ex-wife. As he tells it, she's racist, homophobic, backwards, just a real redneck. So terrible that he even hates her pastor.

OK, fine. We all sometimes let our hearts (or regions farther down) lead us places our brain knows better than to go.

But after he's gone on and on about what a terrible, terrible trip his ex-wife is, let's say that you Google her. And you discover that he asked her to marry him again right after they got divorced (or in our case, that he ran for senator after deciding he didn't want to be our representative any more). AND that he was considering proposing yet a third time (or entertaining the idea of running for governor) right as the two of you were starting to date.

Wouldn't that start to throw up some red flags about him? If she's so terrible, why would he keep going back to her, unless he was either lying about how bad she was or liked all that stuff?

If Harold Ford is so over Tennessee, why does he sound like he's trying to convince himself how much we suck?