Ford Passes on New York Senate Seat

I thought carpetbaggers were supposed to head the other way.

"Ford says he won’t seek N.Y. Senate seat" by Bloomberg News | March 3, 2010

WASHINGTON - Harold Ford Jr., a former Tennessee congressman on leave from his job as a Merrill Lynch & Co. banker, said he won’t run against US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, a fellow Democrat.

Ford, in an opinion-page article published in The New York Times yesterday, accused Democratic “party bosses’’ of working to “bully me out of the race.’’ He said he decided to forgo his challenge for the good of the party.

“If I run, the likely result would be a brutal and highly negative Democratic primary - a primary where the winner emerges weakened and the Republican strengthened,’’ Ford, 39, wrote. He said the “party bosses who tried to intimidate me’’ are the “same people responsible for putting Democratic control of the Senate at risk.’’

I sense bitterness and resentment in the room.

Ford’s announcement means Gillibrand, 43, has “caught a real break,’’ said Hank Sheinkopf, a New York-based political consultant. “Gillibrand should be dancing in the streets,’’ Sheinkopf said in a telephone interview. “It means she is going to get her dream: no primary, no real general election.’’

Ford, who moved to New York in 2006, took his leave of absence as a vice president of Merrill Lynch, now a unit of Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America Corp., to explore a possible primary challenge against Gillibrand.

Ford served as a US representative from Tennessee for a decade starting in 1997, succeeding his father, who held the seat for 22 years. He lost a bid to become a senator from Tennessee in 2006.

So he became a banker!

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