Moderate Dems Have GOP Running Scared

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Oct. 30, 2006 issue - The sun is just rising over Chattanooga when Harold Ford Jr. begins to pray. A young African-American congressman from Memphis, Ford is running as the Democratic candidate for Senate in Tennessee. Here, in the shadow of Lookout Mountain, an audience of 300 has come out of the early-morning darkness into the historic Read House hotel to hear Ford praise the Lord and lecture man. Dressed in dark suits and hats fit for a Sunday service, they bow their heads and thank a God who "even now has dipped us in fresh, anointing oil." They shout Hallelujah as a soprano sings "Amazing Grace." And they cheer and clap when Ford welcomes them, and the spirit of Jesus, into the room. "I love Jesus, I can't help it," the congressman tells the crowd. "We serve such a big God," he shouts, and a chorus of Amens agrees.

It is a storied place to pray. "Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain in Tennessee," Martin Luther King Jr. cried in his "I Have a Dream" speech, and four decades later, the diverse crowd that has gathered here suggests that in many ways, freedom has. Looking out at his audience, Ford offers political pronouncements in the cadence of Scripture. "The politics of destruction," he shouts, "the politics of those who define and malign people, that's all coming to an end." He asks the audience to "heal and make whole this great country of ours" with "a renewed sense of faith." Pointing to the sky, he tells them that "as long as your faith derives from up there, and not down there, we're going to be OK."

Ford's intertwining of the secular and the sacred would make many urban liberals squirm. So would much else that comes out of his mouth today. From the podium, he says he gets "in trouble with my party because I believe a government is only as good as its ability to defend itself and protect itself." (That stance wouldn't actually trouble most Democrats, but the implication that Democrats are weak on defense might.) Later, as he makes his way out of the room, he spots a Fox News Channel correspondent who's flown in from out of town. "Mr. Cameron!" he yells, throwing his arms around Carl Cameron, the network's political correspondent. "So good to see you again." Before the day is done, Ford will reiterate his opposition to same-sex marriage and late-term abortions.

Ford, 36, believes these conservative stands, coupled with an unrelenting attack on his Republican foe's positions on Iraq, homeland security and immigration, is the only way a Democrat can win in today's conservative Tennessee. "If I was doing the textbook thing that Democrats do," he tells NEWSWEEK, "I'd say, 'Republicans want to short Social Security, they want to rob poor children of their college education, they want to deny families the education system.' Don't get me wrong, there's some truth to that. But that's not me. Just let me be myself."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15366095/site/newsweek/