Friday, September 08, 2006

 

The rub 'gainst Junior

The Nashville Scene's Liz Garrigan scores a rhetorical homerun with this'n, mainly 'cause she knows that the only appropriate way to refer to Harold Ford, Jr., is to call him "Junior":


Let’s start with experience. We’ll give Jr. this: he knows Washington, D.C., as well as anyone. Hell, he makes Al Gore look positively homegrown. This is a guy who grew up going to an elite school in D.C.—St. Albans School for Boys—while his father was in Congress. (Stray fact: day tuition this year at St. Albans is over $26,000 a year, and over $37,000 for boarders.) After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, he went on to law school at the University of Michigan. So far so good.

The preppie kid of a congressman — nothing wrong with that. But when his dad of the same name retired from Congress in 1996, which coincided with Ford Jr.’s graduation from law school, the son was quite literally handed a congressional seat, and the dynasty lived on. He’d had no notable life experience to that point—and most of us don’t at that age.

But Ford has been in Congress ever since. It’s been his career. To put it plainly, he’s never had real employment. Imagine never having gone to a job interview, never shopped health insurance, never floated a check on a crappy salary to cover rent, never negotiated a pay raise or dealt with a prickly boss. It’s a significant void, never having existed outside of the political realm.





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