It looks like former Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton is playing with an entire deck full of race cards:
“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.”
Lovely – just what we need. But wait, there’s more:
“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.”
Have these guys even listened to themselves? I’m just glad no one seriously tried to make the mirror-image of this argument with regard to Obama last year.
Anyhow, the Times glosses over this, but Nikki Tinker tried the same bullshit last time and got utterly pasted. Sure, Herenton is much better-known, but Tinker had the endorsement of EMILY’s List (to their everlasting shame) and spent half a million bucks. With any luck, Herenton will meet the same fate.
What the fucking hell is wrong with that guy?
Chism is right about this:
But Steve Cohen represents blacks much better than Nicki Tinker or Herenton do.
Racism is disgusting no matter whose mouth it comes out of, white or black, Jewish or Christian… These people should really listen to themselves.
What is this, 1950?
Truly Disgusting. I hope Obama comes out for Cohen much quicker this time. As much as he is hated in the netroots, It would also be nice for Harold Ford Jr. to come out for Cohen as well.
The 69 year old Herenton has had more than a whiff of scandal. Newspaper articles speculate on when he will be indicted for profiting from real estate deals, city contracting deals revolving around the FedEx forum basketball arena, and of course the rumored affair as head of the Memphis schools before he ran successfully for Mayor.
Cohen looks like a lot safer bet for Memphis.
Does Sidney Chism think the African-American’s in the district are not Christian? That might be news to a lot of them. This is ugly on many many levels.
Just shameful.
assuming his own scandals don’t force him out of the primary earlier.
Cohen is very popular with the voters of this district and they can see through this kind of divisive trash. “Pasted” doesn’t even start to communicate just how badly Tinker lost. It was 79-19%!
When Cohen retires, the odds are very good an African-American representative will follow him. But Cohen has been a better advocate for his district’s citizens than Ford ever was. To call Cohen a racist is an insult to African-Americans who suffer very real racism every day in this country.
The way the 2008 campaign went heartens me about the voters in the district, given how badly Tinker lost. The optics of Cohen losing in the face of a campaign like this would be ugly, ugly, ugly.
Of course it had a pretty small sample size. Still, hopes springs eternal that Memphis will continue to reject racism like it did in 2008’s primary.
from Niki Tinker?
that there’s another factor in here…Cohen is VERY socially liberal and it doesn’t fly well with Memphis black preachers who are anti-gay and pro-life, two thinks Cohen is not.
Herenton will get pasted just like Nikki Tinker did. I don’t think Cohen is going to have to worry about it too much.
It really isn’t helpful for the argument that we are seeing a post racial America when it is actually black people playing the race card (i.e. Tinker, Bobby Rush during the Roland Burris fiasco, and now this…). All this does is give the right wing fodder to rile up the tea party base more.
Or we could go to my other theory, that Herenton is from a different generation of African American leaders that see the race issue through a more confrontational lens, like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. But Tinker was not from that generation, since she was much younger.
I really hope that Cohen stays in office until he himself is like 80 years old. For those people who thought TN-09 is a black seat, or even a Ford seat, it would really bring them back to reality.
Not to be racist, but blacks who try to exploit being discriminated against for political gain don’t deserve to be anywhere near public office or in a public position. (I have the same problem with Bobby Rush and Al Sharpton, among others). Same with any other “protected class” group. It disgusts me that there are people in these groups that can’t act like adults and have to cry “racism” or “sexism” or “discrimination” whenever they don’t get their exact way 100% of the time. Using historical arguments promoting segregation and/or “revenge”, i.e. “all whites are evil because their ancestors put my ancestors into slavery” or “all men are evil/pigs because women were discriminated against for centuries in Western culture” is another thing that I find repugnant. I’m sorry if my ancestor’s second cousin fifteen times removed might’ve owned slaves or beaten his wife, but that has nothing to do with who I am as a person, or how I treat women, etc. To suggest equivalence in character based on ancestry alone is completely idiotic.
In any case, Herenton has been an embarrassment to Memphis for almost 30 years. Given Tennessee’s current delegation, there’s always room for one more embarrassment, but Cohen’s 1000% better than anyone else in the delegation. I hope he can hold on against this scumbag, and I think he will.
Herenton is also the guy who resigned being mayor to run for congress, then filed papers to run for the special election for his seat that was opened by his resignation. If this man isn’t by simple terms “unstable” or “dellusional” I don’t know what is.
There must be black candidates that would actually be good, thoughtful representatives for TN-09. The fact that they choose not to run against Cohen, that only goofballs like Tinker and Herenton do, speaks volumes.
for folks like Herenton, Tinker, Helms, Limbaugh, Hannity and all those racist bomb throwers out there in nutjob-land.
Cohen is the most representive of that district in decades and he’ll wipe the floor with Herenton just as well as he did with Tinker. God..sometimes, some black pols are so dumb, even black voters run away from them.
Don’t get me wrong, race still plays a huge role, but I think it’s often used as a cloak for ulterior motives. Even though Harold Ford Jr. was a crappy Democrat who ideologically sold out his constituents time and again, he hailed from a politically connected family that could grease the wheels of the Memphis/Shelby County Democratic machines and bring back lots of pork barrel money to fund local pols’ pet projects (there’s a reason why he has so many family members that have been in trouble with the law before). Hence, he was never primaried even though he should have been.
Cohen, having largely avoided most of that during his rise to Congress, isn’t obligated to play ball in that way. So some Memphis political types like Herenton would like to go back to the old ways of political patronage and cement their power. Like others said, the respectable and mainstream black leaders in Memphis largely support Cohen, but the crooked types like Herenton will always look for a way back in.
that Tinker ran a disgustingly anti-Semitic race, far worse than anything Herenton has yet done. We all know that anti-Semitism persists among whites and blacks alike. The scandal, from my perspective, was that the pseudo-progressive Emily’s List continued to support her for a long time after the Hitlerian nature of her campaign was obvious. They finally did bail, like rats fleeing a sinking ship, but it was far too late to mean anything by then. That race showed me the craven, stubborn, narcissistic, and unprincipled nature of Emily’s List.