Race a factor in Tennessee senate race

not.

[rquoter]"Is America Ready?"

"Is America Ready?" That's the question posed on the cover of this week's Newsweek featuring Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, a recent Newsweek poll, and other recent national surveys conducted by Gallup, Fox News, NBC/Wall Street Journal, Rasmussen Reports and Cook/RT Strategies. The question of whether U.S. voters are ready to elect a woman, an African American - or a Mormon for that matter - is something that political junkies will presumably continue to ponder for the course of the 2008 campaign. For those pondering such a question now, let me suggest a resource (and interview with Democratic pollster Celinda Lake) and one possibly overlooked point (about the candidacy of Harold Ford, Jr.).

In an interview that aired over the weekend (via an AAPOR member), my long-ago boss Celinda Lake spoke with NPR's Scott Simon about the challenges of asking the kinds of questions included in most of the recent surveys. Although she was understandably vague, given the nature of the brief interview, about how she arrived at her conclusions, Lake argued that 5 to 10 percent of voters lie on such questions, giving "tell the interviewer what they believe is the politically correct thing to say." She also made this notable observation:

It's very hard to poll now because people are reading in partisanship. So where Republicans and Democrats used to be equally supportive of a woman for president, when you ask that now, Republicans are less supportive because they assume you mean Hillary Clinton.

The same question - Is America ready for a woman or an African American president - also came up at the post-election conference I attended last week, and the four pollsters generally agreed that a race involving Clinton or Obama was not likely to be about race or gender. Many pointed to the Tennessee Senate race as evidence that the race of Democrat Harold Ford Jr. did little to limit his appeal. Several panelists throughout the day said that given the partisanship, Ford did as well as any Democrat could have, adding that a candidate like Jim Webb won in Virginia only because Virginia is less Republican than Tennessee.

The exit polls for Tennessee and Virginia tend to support that point. Both Democratic candidates received exactly the same percentage of support from Democratic partisans. Ford's race was certainly no unique barrier to those that identified as Democrats, although Webb did slightly better among independents (though one might quibble about the statistical significance of that difference. Similarly, in the Maryland Senate race, African American Republican Michael Steele did precisely as well among Republicans (94%) as Corker in Tennessee and Allen in Virginia.



Of course, one point made by both Celinda Lake in her NPR interview and Democratic pollster Harrison Hickman at the Cook Conference is that people think of presidents, and evaluate potential presidents, differently than Senators and Governors. As with all of the most interesting questions, we will have to wait and see what the political future holds. [/rquoter]

 

sorry batman, looks like tennessee is no more racist than the rest of the country, and the "racist bimbo" ad had no effect.

 

forget to eat your wheaties this morning?

 

so i did:

http://www.pollster.com/mystery_pollster/is_america_ready.php

 

if you'd spent any time at all in tennessee, and i lived there for five years, you'd know ford's family was his biggest problem. here's the latest example:

http://www.nashvillecitypaper.com/index.cfm?section_id=33&screen=news&news_id=53729

[rquoter]ohn Ford indicted on new federal fraud charges
By Jared Allen, jallen@nashvillecitypaper.com
December 18, 2006

Former State Sen. John Ford is expected to turn himself into federal authorities and be placed under arrest this afternoon on six counts of fraud and concealment, U.S. Attorney Craig S. Morford announced this morning.

Morford on Monday unsealed the six-count federal indictment, which charges that Ford engaged in two separate long-running schemes to defraud the public and pocket his own consulting fees by hooking up two companies – one of which he jointly owned – with millions of dollars in TennCare contracts.

According to the indictment, Ford himself took in over $800,000 in consulting fees from the two companies, the Pennsylvania-based Managed Care Services Group (MCSG) and the Michigan-based United American Health Care Corporation (UACH).

Ford was a 40 percent owner in MCSG, the indictment alledges.

The Memphis senator resigned from the State Senate last year after being indicted on federal corruption charges for his involvement in the Tennessee Waltz sting operation.

Ford pled not guilty to all charges in his Tennessee Waltz indictment.

This latest joint FBI-TBI investigation into Ford is unrelated to Tennessee Waltz, federal officials said Monday morning.

However, the investigation that resulted in Monday’s indictment is similar in many respects to Tennessee Waltz, in which the FBI created a fake company to catch lawmakers accepting bribes to promote that company’s interests at the Capitol.

While the two companies involved in the current corruption case are real, the indictment alleges that Ford promised and took great lengths to provide the two with lucrative TennCare contracts in exchange for heafty consulting fees.

The indictment charges Ford with usurping his duty to advocate the public’s interest ahead of his own, and with failing to disclose his personal relationships with the entities he was promoting.

“The indictment that we released today is based on a very simple premise, that the people of Tennessee have a right to expect honest services from their public officials,” Morford said. “The indictment alleges that Sen. Ford deprived the people of the state of Tennessee of that right.”

Ford is expected to make his first appearance in federal court in Nashville on Tuesday before U.S. District Court Judge Aleta Trauger.

For more on this story, read Tuesday’s City Paper.[/rquoter]

and his dad is a corrupt machine politician from the old school.

 

probably a video of his wife talking about her baby daddy.