While it is too early for us to call the winner for Senate, does it really matter?
When it comes to the issues, Harold Ford Jr. and Bob Corker are too similar, giving Tennesseans few options to choose from. The problem is that both candidates have been vying for the votes of conservative southerners, making the election moot for moderates and liberals.
The reason for this lack of choice is partly due to the obsession to see which political party will be in power, making the Tennessee Senate election a national fiasco for all to watch, and thereby ignoring the issues that Tennesseans should be discussing to improve both the state and the nation.
When the debate centers around who is going to take the House or the Senate, the issues become drowned and the details lost. For example, consider the war in Iraq. You have Ford vaguely advocating Sen. Joe Biden's (D-Delaware) plan to divide Iraq into three divisions and Corker distancing himself from Bush and his own party.
It is not surprising then, considering the failure to debate, that this campaign turned sour so quickly. Because really, how can two politicians with similar goals debate? If Ford and Corker agree on the issues, then all they've got to talk about is each other.
But the worst part of this frivolous election was the media saturation. The late night phone calls, road signs and the TV ads (that would run consecutively, sometimes three in a row) disrupted Tennesseans' lives for two months, and for what? So that one of these two men can be shipped to Washington, D.C. and continue the tired partisanship that is devouring our country from the inside. It doesn't matter who wins, because Tennessee has already lost.
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