Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee's ninth Congressional District, once the fiefdom of two Harold Fords, is up for reelection in August of 2010. Just like last year, Cohen is facing a black opponent in his bid to represent a mostly black district who is using race against him. Last year Nikki Tinker rode the race-baiting strategy to a landslide loss -- 79 percent to 19 percent. This year, former Memphis Mayor Willie W. Herenton is going for broke:
“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.”
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“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.”
Sure. Like last year, the circumstances of this election are likely to provoke outrage among clueless right-wingers who can't see how much the identity-based campaigns of Cohen's opponents resemble the classic right-wing playbook -- namely paint your opponent as a cultural outsider who holds regular people in contempt. The big difference -- other than the fact that it's more flagrant -- is that it's a black person doing it to a white person, so it inflames the tribal sensibilities of conservatives who spent all of last year appropriating a similar strategy against the black man in the White House. They will forget that Cohen beat Tinker in a landslide last year despite her associating him with the KKK and attacking Cohen's religion, and they will use the election as another example of the fact that "reverse-racism" is the real problem in American society.
Cohen will have a tougher fight on his hands with Herenton not because he's black, but because -- unlike Tinker -- he's actually held citywide office in Memphis. He has political capital and connections -- despite corruption allegations -- that Tinker didn't have. But, for obvious reasons, he deserves to lose -- not just because of his race-baiting approach, but because he's wrong. The underlying thesis of Herenton's campaign is that white people can't represent black people. It's fortunate for President Obama that most Americans didn't decide the reverse last year.
That thesis just plainly isn't true. There's no evidence that a black representative would, by virtue of his background, do a better job than Cohen in looking out for his constituents' interests. Black representation in Congress certainly is important, but it's actually a secondary issue to black people choosing their own representatives. The point is for black people to have a voice in Congress -- for the mostly African American voters of TN-09, that voice has been Steve Cohen. It may well be again.
-- A. Serwer
