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Harold Ford on Condoms and Electric Cord Whippings

Sabrina Jaszi

Published Feb 7, 2010

Modified Feb 7, 2010

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Sabrina Jaszi

Published Feb 7, 2010

Modified Feb 7, 2010

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Senate hopeful Harold Ford Jr. gave another memorable interview, this time over a garden omelet at a Union Square bistro. Meanwhile the Daily News dug up “Say it Loud,” the award-winning newspaper column Ford wrote in his college days at U Penn. Seems like—though pedicures are a recent development—his gift for gab goes back at least that far. Coming from a work-out at Equinox the man who “could sell a snowball in a blizzard,” did his best to sell the NY Times’s Marueen Dowd. Some choice cuts from the interview:

On childhood: “My grandmother beat the [expletive] out of us with an electric cord,”
On interracial marriage: “There was so much bad racial stuff out of Tennessee on Obama. I’m in an interracial marriage. I don’t want to subject my wife to this, and I want to start a family. I think my marriage is more accepted here than it would be in Tennessee.”
On gay marriage: “There were pastors in my Tennessee district who said you can minister to someone and change their sexual orientation. I just never accepted that. I’m a heterosexual. I don’t know what anyone can say to me to make me sexually be with a man.”

On NY politics: “I started paying closer attention to New York politics, and I was pleasantly — not pleasantly — but I was surprised by how serious the New York political class were in their opposition to Senator Gillibrand.”

Back in college, Ford was just as outspoken. From his column:

On condoms: "Hell, if we're going to distribute condoms, why not also just have a class on how ... to actually use them and then how to properly remove them without causing pain?"
On the 1991 NY Giants: "Even with your beloved [quarterback] Phil [Simms] at the helm, you guys couldn't even beat the Bengals."
On blacks in politics: "We must remove the hood of political predictability that has stunted the growth of the black politic. We must venture into the Republican Party."

Though his campaign wasn’t happy about the column’s public airing Ford—as usual—was ready to spill. "When I was in college," he said, "I thought I might [go into journalism]."

Tagged

column

harold ford jr.

interview

senate

u penn

Sabrina Jaszi

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