Thirteen days before the election, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that under the New Jersey Constitution, gay couples were entitled to the same rights as heterosexual couples. Senate candidate Harold Ford, Jr. was quick to denounce the decision, stating:
"I do not support the decision today reached by the New Jersey Supreme Court regarding gay marriage. I oppose gay marriage, and have voted twice in Congress to amend the United States Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage. This November there's a referendum on the Tennessee ballot to ban same-sex marriage - I am voting for it."
Kos
posted Ford's denunciation, and responded by saying:
First of all, what New Jersey does is none of Ford's business.
Second of all, the NJ court didn't mandate gay marriage. It mandated equal protection under the law. How fucking awful! It's a disgrace! Equal rights? Pshaw! How dare the NJ Supreme Court refuse to allow discrimination?
Yeah, I want Ford to win. But I won't cry when he doesn't.
The post eventually attracted 1155 comments, including this post of mine, in which I state:
If this is Ford's way of trying to attract homophobe votes, he's going to find that an awful lot of those homophobes are also negrophobes.
This prompted a response by smmsmm57:
May be
but he has to try, doesn't he? Tennessee is trending red and rather fast.
To which I replied:
Nope
He doesn't have to try courting homophobes. He could, instead, try appealing to the American principle of equality before the law. He could try to persuade the good people of Tennessee that bigotry is wrong.
Instead, he is trying to reassure the people that their bigotry is perfectly all right. Not only is this morally repugnant, it's also bad politics. In mere moments, he has given tacit approval to Corker's own appeals to bigotry.
And I might add that as long as politicians like Ford continue to pander to bigotry, Tennessee will continue to, as you put it, trend red. The way to stop that trend is to oppose it, not reinforce it.
ssmssm57 riposted:
And he would lose
By rather large margin. May be - Tennessee would "change for better" in 10 years, but he, probably, wants to win NOW. He is a politician after all, not preacher..
And this was my response:
You can be a leader, or a follower
A leader leads; he gets people to follow him down paths of his own choosing.
A follower follows; he allows others to lead him down paths of their choosing.
Ford has chosen to be a follower; worse, he has chosen to follow the Republicans.
Compare and contrast with Jon Tester. Montana is way redder than Tennessee, yet Tester has chosen to lead the voters of that state to a place where the Republicans can't follow.
That's why Tester is going to win, and why Ford is going to lose.
Yup, that's right. Back on October 26, I predicted in full view of everyone that Jon Tester would win, and that Harold Ford, Jr. would lose. I also said why, in my not so humble opinion, they would do so: because Tester knows better than to try to win by parroting GOP talking points. Instead, he chose to win by coming up with talking points of his own, talking points that resonated with voters, and that his GOP opponent couldn't answer. Ford, by contrast, tried to win by out-bigoting his GOP opponent, only to discover that it couldn't be done.
In the wake of Ford's defeat, there has been a lot of back-and-forth here at dKos over the reasons for his loss. This is my answer: he lost because he tried to out-Republican his Republican opponent, and he discovered, as countless GOP-lite-wannabe Democrats have discovered before him, that it can't be done.
I TOLD YOU SO