The Tennessee Liberal

This article [sorry, having link trouble. It's on the front page.] from today’s Times Free Press about campaign spending is a complete hatchet job. It breathlessly points out that Harold Ford has (GASP!) spent a lot of money that he has raised on travel.

This just in, TFP: Serious candidates spend their early money to raise money for the campaign itself. In a race that will be as hotly contested as the 2006 race her in Tennessee, the fact that the presumptive Democratic nominee has been flying places and hosting fundraisers is just not news.

Perhaps most unnerving about this silly exercise is that Andy Sher felt the need to use a quote calling Rep. Ford’s spending a “shame” at the top of the story, but burying a quote explaining why the expenditures are justified at the very end of the piece.

Of the entire hatchet job – and rest assured, this is a royal hatchet job – the part that irked me most was this pot shot:

He spent nearly $7,000 on ground transportation, some of the money going toward companies such as Smith Limousine Co. of New York. Other expenditures were listed for Washington and Jacksonville, Fla.

This is tremendously disappointing. It's pretty common knowledge that every car service is called a limousine company. This is just a cheap way of trying to paint Harold Ford with the brush of extravagance.

I hope that this is just a glitch in the TFP’s otherwise good reporting on local politics. But if this is a foreshadowing of more journalistic broadsides on Harold Ford, Jr., then it’s going to a be a long campaign.