Steve Cohen Draws Another Primary Opponent Based On Race

Ninety days after being re-elected mayor in October, 2007-- with 42% of the vote-- Memphis' controversial Willie Herenton announced he had other priorities in his life would be stepping down, looking towards regaining his old job as Memphis City School superintendent as a stepping stone to run for Memphis' congressional seat against progressive stalwart Steve Cohen. He's been resigning and postponing resigning all summer but finally made the move on July 30-- and then promptly pulled papers needed to run for mayor in the special election in October to replace him. Today's NY Times reports he has also started a racism-tinged campaign against popular two-term Rep. Steven Cohen.

It's hardly the first time Cohen has been attacked by a racist crank. Like Nikki Tinker, who eked out 19% of the vote against Cohen after a bitterly vicious, anti-Semitic campaign, Herenton, best known by many for his shady business dealings and startling corruption, says he isn't being adequately represented by a white person.

He is running a blistering campaign against Representative Steve Cohen, a fellow Democrat with a precarious hold on the majority black district.

“To know Steve Cohen is to know that he really does not think very much of African-Americans,” Mr. Herenton said in a recent radio interview on KWAM. “He’s played the black community well.”

The primary election in August 2010 pits an unlikely officeholder-- a Jew in a deeply Christian region, a middle-age white man known for fighting for blacks and women-- against a prominent challenger. Already, the campaign has proved how deeply race still infuses much of politics in the South, even after the election of a black president.

...“This seat was set aside for people who look like me,” said Mr. Herenton’s campaign manager, Sidney Chism, a black county commissioner. “It wasn’t set aside for a Jew or a Christian. It was set aside so that blacks could have representation.”

Mr. Cohen, 60, is a well-known Memphis liberal who considered joining the Congressional Black Caucus, wrote a national apology for slavery and the Jim Crow laws, and received an “A” rating from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

“I vote like a 45-year-old black woman,” he said in an interview. “I don’t know the black experience, but I know about being a minority and being discriminated against because of religion.”

But his unusual identity-- as one of only two white members of Congress from majority black districts-- makes him vulnerable politically. In the last election, his opponent ran a much-vilified advertisement that tried to link Mr. Cohen to the Ku Klux Klan. It juxtaposed Mr. Cohen with an image of a hooded Klansman and criticized him for voting not to rename a state park currently named for a Klan founder, Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Politically, Cohen has attached himself to Barack Obama, inarguably the most popular political figure in Memphis. (McCain only managed to scrap together 22% of the vote in TN-09 last year, far worse than Bush did in 2000 or 2004-- and his worst performance in Tennessee, which he won with 57%.) Cohen is inherently far more progressive and far more oriented towards overt action towards helping struggling working families than Obama's centrist corporate-friendly administration is. On June 16 Cohen wasn't among the 32 Democrats voting against the war supplemental. It may have been where his heart was but he wasn't about to do anything to piss off Rahm Emanuel at a time when a wink and a nod from Obama could determine the primary victor. Similarly, Cohen-- a fanatic supporter of universal health care reform-- wasn't one of the Progressive Caucus members vowing to defy President Obama and vote against his reform legislation if it didn't include the kind of meaningful reform Emanuel's corporate allies are dead set against. It's a very peculiar position for a fighting liberal like Cohen to be in, but he is surely aware that pleasing Emanuel (and Obama) means a lot more right now than walking in lockstep with close congressional allies like John Conyers, Donna Edwards and Maxine Waters in a battle to secure a health care bill that would be ideal for constituents of TN-09, where 89,000 uninsured people-- of the 107,000 who currently have no health insurance-- would stand to gain high-quality, affordable insurance if a bill with the public option passes. Conyers, Edwards and Waters are part of the team demanding that Obama stick with that-- in the face of mounting pressure from corporate shills to abandon it. Cohen has little choice but to cheer lead the president's public stand that thus far seems to favor the same goals progressives like Conyers, Edwards and Waters are insisting on.

Last year John Barrow-- another white politician in a district where most Democrats are black, albeit, unlike the liberal Cohen, a very conservative anti-family rep-- had his political skin saved by Obama when Obama endorsed him against a progressive African-American state senator, Regina Thomas. Barrow has gone on to rack up one of the most jaw-dropping anti-Obama voting records of any Democrat in Congress; he is currently aggressively campaigning against meaningful health care reform. It should be informative to watch and see how Obama handles the primary challenge that Barrow faces-- Thomas, a stalwart fighter for health care reform and for the Obama agenda, is likely to run against him again-- in comparison to how he handles the primary battle between Cohen and Herenton.