Over at The Daily Beast, Jacob Bernstein lays the groundwork for Harold Ford’s upcoming contention that the reason people will not vote for him is not because he’s a greasy carpet-bagging bankwhore, but because he’s married to a …[look both ways...whisper] white woman and the state of New York (which is 97% white and New York City is, like, double that) does not cotton to that kind of thing.

Last week, Harold Ford, Jr., a presumptive Democratic challenger to Kirsten Gillibrand for Hillary Clinton’s old Senate seat, explained his love for New York by saying that it was easier to be in an interracial marriage here than it is in the Deep South. “There was so much bad racial stuff out of Tennessee on Obama,” he told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. “I’m in an interracial marriage. I don’t want to subject my wife to this.”

In 2006, the five-time Tennessee congressman, who was reelected four times with 80 percent of the vote—ran for Bill Frist’s Senate seat and lost by three percentage points, after being pilloried in ads for, among other things, his relationships with white women.

Following that loss, Ford, who comes from a dynastic political family tree in Tennessee (with the requisite bad apples), left the state and embarked on a new career, with a seven-figure job working for Merrill Lynch. He also married Emily Threlkeld, 29, a former fashion publicist, who is white.

[...]

Threlkeld is not a highly visible political spouse, although a New York Times Styles section interview is reportedly imminent. After attending the University of Miami (she is from Naples, Florida), Threlkeld worked in the fashion industry for most of her career. Her mother, Debbie, is now the wife of Anson Beard, a well-known Wall Street investor and former chairman of Morgan Stanley. (Anson’s brother, Peter, is a famous fashion photographer and photojournalist.)

So Ford was elected to the House five times in Tennessee but when he tried to go All-State people were like, “Whoa. Hey. This guy is black!” except that he’s more Skinny White Chocolate Frappichino black as opposed to Afrika Bambaataa black. But black, nonetheless. And when people in Tennessee saw stuff like this:

…they didn’t see a man with the all of the sincerity, natural warmth, and intellectual honesty of, say, a Bill Kristol, they saw the Memphis Mandingo so…. ‘no Senate for you’. Then Harold was forced to move to NYC where he married a white woman, who just happens to have connections to Wall Street, and he changed his name to David Hampton and now New Yorkers have to vote for him or they will die of White Guilt.

The end.