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Republicans say they see something else: a prep-schooled, Armani-wearing dandy who has a thin record and is more at home in five-star Manhattan hotels than in Tennessee barbecue joints. Ford is "someone who spent his entire life in Washington and comes into this race with a truly different background to draw upon," says former Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker, who won a brutal three-way Republican primary last week and will face Ford in November. The National Republican Senatorial Committee put up the website www.fancyford.com to chronicle Ford's tastes, right down to where he gets his pedicures; its Democratic counterpart, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, responded with www.fancyfrist.com to show that the Republican who holds the job now is not exactly a stranger to the finer things in life, including traveling on private jets provided by corporations.
Harder to laugh off is the fact that Ford comes from a large political family that has had no small amount of controversy and scandal connected to it. So Ford doesn't try to, and tells audiences, "Anybody who has a recipe for family ought to send it to me." His Congressman father--whom Ford Jr. calls "my best friend and mentor and top adviser"--was charged with federal bank fraud and acquitted in 1993. The day after Ford Jr. announced his candidacy, his uncle, a former state senator, was indicted for bribery. His aunt's election last September to that state-senate seat with a 13-vote victory was voided because of voting irregularities in which she has not been implicated. She won the Democratic primary last week in her bid to regain a seat.
But the Ford name is also what got Harold Jr. elected to fill his father's Memphis congressional seat when he was only 26 and freshly out of law school--"my first full-time job," he says. Harold Jr. was only 4 years old when he starred in his first political ad, climbing on a table to record a radio spot for his father in which he promised to lower cookie prices. And his name gave him some leeway to stake out more centrist positions that might have jeopardized the career of any other lawmaker representing the state's most liberal district.
Ford says his more conservative philosophy is shaped by the fact that he grew up in a different world from his father, who was raised without running water and came of age during the civil rights movement. "George W. Bush is different from his father. Al Gore is different from his father," Ford says, citing two other dynastic brand names. "It's called life, I guess." Where his father's generation had "one tool, and that was a hammer, now there's a much bigger toolbox," Ford adds. "It's just my politics. I look at what works."