If He Can Make It There, He’ll Make It Anywhere

What kind of strategy is this?

“If I am elected senator from New York, Harry Reid will not instruct me how to vote,” he said, referring to Mr. Reid’s efforts to keep him out of the campaign.

But this isn’t Tennessee. Barack Obama got 63 percent of the vote. People want a Senator who’ll support the progressive agenda. But the NYT tells us that Ford “blasted [Gillibrand's] support for the proposed health care overhaul, which is expected to cost New York an extra $1 billion a year.” This is true in a certain literal sense. There’s a certain irony in the fact that progressive policies, by transferring wealth from rich people to poor people, wind up transferring wealth from (relatively rich) progressive states to (relatively poor) conservative ones. But who wins a Democratic primary by running against helping poor people?

This guy, I guess:

Asked whether he had visited all five boroughs, he mentioned taking a helicopter ride across the city with fellow executives, at the invitation of Raymond W. Kelly, New York City’s police commissioner. “The only place I have not spent considerable time is Staten Island,” he said, adding that “I landed there in the helicopter, so I can say yes.”

Should someone tell him that a Senator is going to have to make it all the way to Buffalo and Binghamton and Albany and such? There’s a lot of travel involved, and it can’t all be done by helicopter.

Both Ford and Gillibrand are people with conservative records who’ve flipped to more progressive positions on various issues. And for my money, flipping to more progressive positions is to be embraced. But on key topics like health care, Ford is refusing to flip. And this line that New York politicians shouldn’t support any policy that leads to a net drain of dollars out of the state is going to be completely toxic to any kind of progressive economic policy.