I was listening to a bit of NPR and not surprisingly perhaps, heard that Tennesseans are shocked at an ad that seems to infer that Harold Ford likes to party with white women.

To be perfectly honest, when the Democrats were cycling Harold Ford Jr. through one of their routine infatuations with this or that black politician as a possible presidential candidate, it simply didn't register with me that Ford was black.

It seems there was plenty of partying with white men and women among Harold's ancestors--not that unusual really considering the liberties taken with slaves, but even without slavery, mixed race is the rule rather than the exception. In the U.S., 50% of all Hispanics are either Mulatto or Mestizo (native American heritage). We stopped counting Mulattos in the U.S. Census early in the 20th century, but its safe to say that a majority of African Americans have European ancestry as well.

I think its smart for the Ford campaign to take issue with the whole black man-white woman thing, but the ad was clearly going for the much more politically explosive aspect of Ford's single status--his promiscuity.

Ford is in a bad spot being a batchelor, because the default assumption is that he is gay, so partying with bunnies could be considered a good thing in some respects since horn-dog goes over better in the mid-west than gay, particularly in light of Mark Foley's page predilection. For a guy who has been groomed for politics since childhood, its a curiosity that Ford didn't get married at some point. Even a real gay fellow like Jim McGreevey could see that married-with-kids was a political asset, so much so that he did it twice.

Good luck getting Ford to talk about it

The irony is that Ford probably isn't black enough for a really bright political future--not with a "real" black man like Barack Obama already a senator and poised for a run at the White House. Obama is mixed race as well, but he was perhaps fortunate to retain more of his father's phenotype than his mother's.

The NBA has made black-men-with-white-women a big yawn, but among blacks, skin tone is a complex social issue, and a political one as well.