Harold Ford Jr.

As a service to Mr. Ford, Salon is happy to offer the following suggestions for the next leg of his Unbridled Ambition ’10 national tour:

 Michigan

Office to seek: Governor is open this year.

He’s a resident because …: He graduated from the University of Michigan’s law school in 1996.

Campaign strategy: Claim to be a distant relative of Henry Ford and promise to revive the auto industry with an even bigger infusion of federal money — while also declaring, “I am a capitalist.“

Pedicure suggestion: Foxy Nails; 2931 Carpenter Road, Ann Arbor 

Pennsylvania

Office to seek: U.S. Senate

He’s a resident because …: Did you know he did his undergrad work at Penn?

Campaign strategy: Just import his New York strategy (run to the right of Gillibrand) — but with Arlen Specter and Joe Sestak both scrapping for votes on the left, there might be enough room here to win! Or at least finish a respectable third!

Pedicure suggestion: Oggi Salon and Spa; 1700 Locust Street, Philadelphia 

District of Columbia

Office to seek: Mayor

He’s a resident because …: This one’s easy. He was raised here when his dad was in Congress, attended St. Albans and lived here when he served in the House from 1997 to 2007.

Campaign strategy: Adrian Fenty is the Kirsten Gillibrand of the District — a sitting duck, if someone serious would just step forward and challenge him. Downside: Mayor of D.C. is not a great stepping-stone to national office; Ford would have to move again in a few years to run for higher office.

Pedicure recommendation: Joy’s Nails; 2471 18th Street, NW 

Texas

Office to seek: Governor

He’s a resident because …: He was the Barbara Jordan Visiting Professor at the University of Texas’ Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs in 2008

Campaign strategy: Remember when I voted to shield gun manufacturers from lawsuits when I was running for the Senate in Tennessee? And how I pretended I hadn’t when I was running in New York? Yeah, well let’s just forget all the New York stuff.

Pedicure recommendation: No real Texan would be caught dead getting one. Take the helicopter to Joy’s in DC.

Two contributions are worth singling out, through, for their absurdity.

The first, from GOP consultant Ed Rollins, begged Obama to stop blaming George W. Bush and the GOP for the problems he inherited. “Lincoln, the Roosevelts and many other previous presidents also had messes sitting on their desks when they came to office, but they focused on fixing the problems instead of placing the blame,” he wrote.

Notice that Rollins failed to include his old boss, Ronald Reagan, in that list. Rollins actually ran the White House’s political shop during the 1982 midterms. And if you know anything about ’82, you know that blaming Jimmy Carter and the Democrats was a major part of Reagan’s and the GOP’s strategy.

As the country plunged into a recession late 1981 and ’82, Reagan relentlessly sought to remind voters of the high unemployment, inflation and interest rates that had marked his predecessor’s presidency.

Here was Reagan, on the campaign trail just before the ’82 vote: “Our critics are saying our economy is on its knees. Well, you know something, if the economy is back on its knees, that’s quite an improvement because two years ago it was flat on its back.”

And here’s a description of a television commercial Republicans ran across the country that year, from the New York Times:

In one of the ads, an ”attorney” reads a ”last will” as he sits between a Carter look-alike and an actor resembling Democratic House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. To the tune of ”Hearts and Flowers,” the lawyer intones: ”To Ronald Reagan we leave a recession, inflation at 12.4 percent and rising, gas prices sky-high, government spending money like it was going out of style. . .”

In other words, Obama, in blaming Bush and the GOP, is pretty much following the script that Reagan wrote — while Rollins worked for him. Rollins could have made the point that the strategy was ineffective, based on the GOP’s loss of 26 House seats in the ’82 midterms. But he didn’t even mention that, and instead tried to turn his “advice” into an unfavorable comparison between Obama and Lincoln and the two Roosevelts.

And then there’s Harold Ford, who issued one of his familiar pleas for corporate tax relief — a talking point that has endeared him to his narrow, if absurdly wealthy, donor base. But I’ll leave that aside. Here’s how Ford characterized Obama’s political position:

In normal times, his historic achievements — from saving the car industry and banking system to health care and financial reform to successes against Al Qaeda — would form the backbone of a winning midterm-election campaign.

This is just baffling. Is Ford suggesting that in “normal times,” Democrats would be poised to win seats this fall? That’s ridiculous. The White House’s party always loses seats in midterm elections — except in decidedly abnormal times (like 2002, when post-9/11 trauma aided the GOP). Or maybe Ford is just saying the losses would be minimal in “normal times”? But that ignores the fact that just about all of the achievements he cites were only possible because of the grim conditions the country now faces. In “normal times,” no one needs to save the banking and auto industry.

I guess the main thing the Times accomplished with this feature was to prove, once again, what happens when you ask a dumb question.