The increasingly bizarre and still unofficial race between Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and former Tennessee lawmaker Harold Ford Jr. just keeps getting stranger. After Ford escalated his attacks against the appointed Senator by calling her a "parakeet," Gillibrand called up the Post to rant about her possible rival. "I really don't know who Harold Ford thinks I am but I'm not gonna be pushed aside [by] his banker buddies," she said in what the tabloid described as an "unsolicited phone call." She added: "Him calling me names doesn't hurt me but it affects New York because it distracts from issues."
Ford seems to have taken that last bit to heart, because instead of mocking the Senator himself, he had spokesman do the job. "She started her career as a tobacco apologist and, after being appointed senator in a backroom deal, has spent her time kowtowing to Washington insiders," said spokesman Davidson Goldin, who has become increasingly protective of the 39-year-old politician following Ford's disastrous Times interview. In a lengthy and interesting piece about Ford and his handlers, the Observer notes that although Gillibrand has a low approval rating, Ford is "still more effective as a trouble maker than as a candidate" and "he's more likely to cost Ms. Gillibrand the seat than he is to win it himself." The paper adds: "It will be easier for him to turn her into Martha Coakley than to transform himself into Scott Brown."
Although Ford has come under fire for his Wall Street job, his other gig as a domestic policy instructor at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service has been largely overlooked. So the Daily News crashed his class on Monday night and found that Ford didn't talk much about his own political aspirations, though he said his office hours might turn out changing because he's "in the middle of making an important decision about my own personal and political future." For homework, he told his 50 graduate students to watch President Obama's State of the Union address and compare it with Bill Clinton's 1995 speech.
