OBAMARAMA

Now the head of the centrist DLC following a bruising 2006 Senate campaign in Tennessee, Harold Ford told students at Malcolm X College yesterday that “You’ve got to fit in the mainstream on values issues. You’ve got to be fair when it comes to economic policy. And you’ve got to be accountable to people” in order to win in the south.

From the article, titled “Ford: Obama can win in South“:

“Can somebody who is black win? The answer is yes,” said Ford.

…A five-term House member who now works as a vice chairman of Merrill Lynch & Co., Ford said he has no Obama envy and remains neutral in the nomination race, despite having long-standing friendships with Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). Both lent him support during his failed bid last year for a Senate seat in his home state.

One other point worth noting: in building his case that southern voters will look past race, the reporter suggests that “Ford’s campaign last fall gained national prominence for reasons beyond his race,” since “Republicans attacked him as a hypocrite in a television ad that featured his past attendance at a Super Bowl party held by Playboy magazine.”

Attacked him as a hypocrite? If you watched the ad, which features a scantily-clad white woman telling Ford to “call me,” you may well have gotten the impression he was being attacked less as a hypocrite than as a black male predator of white women. The controversy over the ad was by no means “beyond his race” — and was decried for that reason by Democrats and Republicans alike. Even Ford’s opponent called for it to be pulled off the air, which it eventually was.

I’m glad to hear that Sen. Obama’s race won’t preclude him from competing in the South, and I’m confident that is the case — but let’s not sugarcoat the particular political potency of racial stereotyping there.