WASHINGTON — It was decades ago, and I forget whom Wendell Ford had come to Louisville, Kentucky, to stump for. But who the Democrat was mattered less — it always mattered less — than that Ford was there to speak on his or her behalf.
“Get ready for a stemwinder,” my Courier-Journal colleague Ed Ryan told me. Ryan, who could be a tough character, said this as if talking about a beloved if faintly comical uncle.
The memory rushed back to me Thursday when the word spread that Ford, after a long battle with cancer, had succumbed at the age of 90.
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Ford reached the crescendo. “When Bill Clinton was president,” he thundered, “THE STREETS WERE PAVED WITH GOLD!” Everyone laughed and cheered in unison.
And for a second you believed it, because it was Wendell, and he had just given a stemwinder.
