On NBC's "Daily Nightly" blog, anchor Brian Williams explained that he was a big fan of Jerry Ford, and has a pile of handwritten letters from Ford in his later years. You can read between the lines the respect and nostalgia liberals have for a moderate Republican in a much more liberal era:
The truth is Jerry Ford was a nice man. He was decent, courageous, honest...and a loving and faithful partner to his wife, a wonderful and trail-blazing woman. By today's political standards he just might be a liberal. By today's standards he is an anachronism of a kind of cooperative, deal-making and dare I say much more bipartisan brand of politics.
The liberal encomiums for a more bipartisan time do seem to omit that the Democrats held the House by a majority of about 145 after the post-Watergate sweep in 1974, so bipartisanship was pretty much mandatory, even if it was a natural fit for Ford.
One of the more interesting Ford stories on Thursday came from Washington Post reporter Jeffrey Birnbaum in the Business section, on Ford's positive economic legacy, not so celebrated at the time. But I very much remember Ford going around on the campaign trail for Reagan in 1980 saying forcefully, "We handed Jimmy Carter the economy on a silver platter....and he blew it!"
And how.
