It looks like Harold Ford Jr. has already decided to drop the lie about him being a life-long liberal. He has an op-ed in the New York Times in which he calls for Democrats to stop pushing for comprehensive health care reform and in its stead push for marginal insurance policy reforms and limitations on medical liability lawsuits. He also calls for minuscule immigration reform, huge tax cuts for businesses, and bipartisan commissions to address the budget deficit (though he doesn’t acknowledge that tax cuts for the wealthy and for business will only increase the deficit). Of course this is the sort of politician always has been – one elephant tail short of being an actual Republican.

There are a lot of bad ideas in American politics. But I’m hard pressed to find one worse than Harold Ford Jr. running as a Democrat for Senate in the state of New York.