Opinion

A place to call home: Harold Ford’s NY fantasy

We need tough. We need somebody who is actually going to fight for New York, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand simply does not fit the bill.

The election process is also a democratic process, and anyone who feels like running should be able to do so.

Whether Ford Jr.’s previous voting record or political philosophies are anything that attracts the citizens of New York is something we will let him know in the voting booth.

Reid and Schumer have no business telling people to butt out.

Both Robert F. Kennedy and Hillary Clinton moved to New York so they could run for the Senate. If Ford Jr. has done the same thing, who’s to complain?

Let the people decide who their elected politicians will be.

Tom Cahill

Manhattan

***

I can count the number of quality Democrats on one hand, but Ford Jr. happens to be one of them whom I believe would make an exceptional candidate to represent the people of New York.

Ford is smart, articulate and has demonstrated the courage of his convictions to vote in favor of pre-emptive war against a mass grave-digging, terrorist-sponsoring, WMD-using, war treaty-breaking super-tyrant without backtracking after the fact, like 99 percent of the pro-war Democratic Party members.

That alone separates him from the typical “leaders” of the Democratic Party.

As this decade unfolded and I saw the rise of Obama, I said to myself, “In a just world, Harold Ford Jr. should have been the first black president.”

He is vastly more qualified, and perhaps winning the New York Senate seat is a step in that direction.

Eugene Dunn

Medford

***

Isn’t it surprising that New York, the great bastion of liberalism, must reach out to a second carpetbagger in 10 years to represent us (“The Spoiler,” Maureen Callahan, PostScript, Jan. 10)?

How pathetic.

Perhaps it is time to jettison the whole ideology from the face of New York politics. Judging by New York’s state of affairs, it has not served us well.

Anthony Varriano

Staten Island

***

Maybe Harold Ford Jr. feels that the NY Democratic powerbrokers can’t throw a black governor off the 2010 ticket and also deprive a black senatorial candidate a shot at the US Senate.

Sen. Chuck Schumer better be careful.

Jim Clements

New Hyde Park

***

It took Maureen Callahan four pages to basically say that Ford Jr. will be another reliable, liberal hack who will vote for trillions of dollars of spending and every economy-destroying socialist venture proposed by House Speaker Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Obama.

Tony Moschetti

High Point, NC

***

If Ford Jr.’s younger brother, Jake, actually recalls then-4-year-old Harold giving his first speeches, as Callahan claims, it’s Jake not Harold, who should be running for the Senate.

New York could use such a genius.

David Margolick

Manhattan

***

Much as I like Ford Jr., he seems to be the kind of post-racial candidate Obama claimed to be.

As far as the up- coming Senate race goes, Ford Jr. is just another carpetbagger being foisted on the state by the Democrats in the proud tradition of RFK and Clinton.

Bob Hunt

Hillsborough, NJ