Is Harold Ford built for the road ahead?

The DLC proves it's living in the past by picking the failed senatorial candidate as its new chairman.

By Thomas F. Schaller

Read more: Bill Clinton, John McCain, James Carville, Joseph Lieberman, Tennessee, Opinion, Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean

Reuters/Jessica Rinaldi

Harold Ford Jr. concedes to his opponent, Republican Senate candidate Bob Corker, at an election night party in Memphis, Tenn., Nov. 7, 2006.

Jan. 19, 2007 | In the final weeks of the 2006 campaign, one could barely turn on the national cable news or talk shows without seeing Harold Ford. And whenever one did see Ford, he was pandering.

There was the Democratic Senate nominee in a Tennessee restaurant, wearing a camouflage baseball hunting cap and talking about how powerful his Jesus was. There he was endorsing ex-Democrat Joe Lieberman in Connecticut and piling on John Kerry. There he was with his dander up about the New Jersey same-sex marriage ruling. Most egregiously, there was Ford, a 37-year-old black man, telling the MSNBC anchor who asked him if he thought the infamous Republican ad with a white girl telling Ford to "call me" was racist, that he didn't know. Ultimately, all his pandering wasn't enough. In a year in which Democrats won six of the seven most competitive Senate races, Ford was the seventh. He lost to Republican Bob Corker by three points.

Last week, Ford accepted as consolation prize the chairmanship of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. In many ways the marriage makes perfect sense. Ideologically, Ford is one of the most conservative black Democrats in national politics. He ran the archetypal DLC campaign in 2006, rebuking and thus affirming almost every cultural trope Republicans deploy to vilify Democrats. Smart, articulate, young, attractive and a fabulous fundraiser, at first blush Ford's face -- despite last fall's overexposure -- seems like a fresh one on the scene at the DLC.

But, much like the Republicans' selection of Florida Sen. Mel Martinez to head the Republican National Committee after an election in which the GOP hemorrhaged Latino support, tapping Ford is a backward-looking attempt to fight the last war. Somehow a young, Southern, corporate-friendly figure is supposed to rewind politics to that moment a decade and a half ago when the DLC was at its zenith -- the keeper of Washington's electoral keys in an era defined by Bill Clinton's fence-straddling "third way."

To fully understand what the Ford choice means for the DLC, consider the man Ford is replacing -- or, better yet, consider the two major national Democrats whom Ford failed to replace.

Once he announced he was running for president, Tom Vilsack was required by DLC bylaws to end his 18-month stint as DLC chairman. It was the popular Democrat's own choice not to run for a third term as Iowa governor last fall. As both a Beltway outsider and a Midwesterner, Vilsack was an interesting person to chair an organization Al From founded 20 years ago as a device for moving Democrats rightward to pacify the party's fading Southern wing. The press release Vilsack issued to announce his departure from the DLC, for example, made special mention of how he'd helped forge "a successful working relationship with organized labor leaders on mutually beneficial issues for the first time." And while DLC policy guru Will Marshall was deriding the "the activist left [as] out of sync with the American public" on Iraq, Vilsack was using his waning hours as governor to urge the Iowa Legislature to pass a resolution decrying the Bush-Lieberman-McCain escalation plan.

Advisors close to Vilsack tell me he was especially proud to help thaw the DLC's chilly relationship with labor. He also closely monitored key documents and statements from the DLC during his tenure that might later be used to depict him unfavorably in the eyes of 2008 Democratic primary voters, a demographic notably more liberal than the DLC. Harold Ford has a reputation for being less detail-oriented generally, but in this case he won't need to worry. His closer ideological fit with the organization is unlikely to foster any serious in-house political disconnect.

Where Ford may find trouble connecting is with two people who are now among the nation's most powerful Democrats, Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean. He sought the job of one, was touted as a replacement for the other, and is an ideological peer of neither.

Next page: "I don't think Nancy Pelosi's kind of politics is what's needed right now," groused Ford