Have you been wondering why power couple Steven Rattner and Maureen White, rich Democratic fundraisers and friends to all local plutocrats, are supporting Harold Ford? Because Kirsten Gillibrand broke Maureen's brothers heart.

Rattner, the Bloomberg confidant and money manager, former Obama car czar and Times reporter who remains close with the paper's owner, Arthur Sulzberger, has gushed about Ford in print. According to one Gillibrand supporter, the senator has ascribed the reason for her discord with the couple to a broken-off relationship with White's younger brother more than a decade ago.

"If I got mad at every girlfriend one of my five brothers ever dated, I'd be mad at a lot of people," White said. "The only relevant part of that story is I've known her longer than most people.

"I'm not enthusiastic about Kirsten for a very simple reason," White continued, "New York State needs someone great. It's not clear to me that she has the talent to follow in the footsteps of Robert Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan or Hillary Clinton."

Yes, Gillibrand cannot hope to follow in the footsteps of two relentlessly ambitious non-New Yorkers who served in the Senate for less than a decade each.

Of course personal pique is not the only reason the rich assholes who control all the money for New York Democrats might throw their support behind a failed Tennessee politician with no name recognition who is also to the right of an incumbent who is already perceived as too conservative. See, Ford lives in their bubble of privilege, and "works" for Merrill Lynch, and so he agrees with them that everyone should probably start being much nicer to bankers. He also, like them, operates under the mistaken belief that anyone has been mean to bankers. The simple fact that someone running under the slogan "let's be much, much meaner to bankers" would win in a historic landslide has not occurred them them—or if it has, perhaps it frightened them into Harold's waiting arms.

It is bizarre and sickening and terrible that large segments of the modern Democratic party do not consider "regulating the financial industry" or even "standing up to bankers" as basically the party's most important core platform, especially this fucking year. Thanks, Clintons and the DLC, for coming up with a way to end the Democratic party's Reagan-era fundraisng problem! It is just too bad that the method you came up with entails "running as the party that is much less crazy than the Republicans and also sometimes tolerates gays and is occasionally willing to defend a woman's right to control her own body unless we really need Ben Nelson's vote." In addiction to the whole racism and white rage thing, this is a good part of the reason why these Tea Party things seem so popular! Because once you declare economic populism off-limits, all that's left is meaningless cultural populism and "taking our country back."

Also, breaking: it is apparently "flip-flopping" to support a conservative Democrat in a race for a senate campaign in Tennessee, but not for a senate campaign in New York. According to the New York Post, of course, and Wayne Barrett at the Village Voice, who has been on a crazy anti-Schumer tear lately that seems to imply that the candidate of a couple plutocrats is in some way more independent than the candidate of the Democratic machine. They both suck, Wayne, but we'll take Schumer over the Rich-Democrats-for-Bloomberg crowd any fucking day. Nice job getting in bed with these monsters, Democrats.

(Also PS remember when Maureen White was arrested for drunk driving and it was hilarious?)
(And also Harold Ford could run as a "Lieberman-style independent," which would be hilarious, because you really do need to appeal to at least some people who don't already have a billion dollars to win an election, even in New York.)