TN-09: Primary day

TN-09: The ridiculous Nikki Tinker's primary challenge against bona fide progressive Rep. Steve Cohen has gotten ugly. Skeptical Brotha lays down a righteous rant against Tinker:

I didn’t think it was possible to be more repellent than [Harold] Ford, but Aunt Nikki is the willing overseer on Pinnacle Airlines corporate plantation as Vice President for Labor Relations and General Counsel. Aunt Nikki is representative of the lowest form of human life and is the worst kind of counterfeit Negress imaginable. As an employment lawyer, she specializes in destroying employee rights to collectively bargain and be free from workplace racial discrimination, harassment, and retaliation.

Her campaign report is full of two kinds of people, acquaintances from her home state of Alabama and her motley collection of crooked contacts in the business world. The CEO of Pinnacle Airlines, Phil Trenary, her boss and corporate puppet master, is represented, as are Republican corporate employment lawyers from her former law firm, John and Ruth Alley. Finally, there is a member of Pinnacle’s Board of Directors, GOP rainmaker and real estate magnate James McGehee and his kith and kin [...]

My colleagues at Black Agenda Report, in their former incarnation as the writers behind Black Commentator, came up with the nifty moniker of Trojan Horse to describe Black Democrats backed surreptitiously by Republican money and the corporate and right-wing foundation elite. They highlighted BET’s Bob Johnson and politicians Cory Booker and Harold Whore, Jr. Speaking of the Whore, he has used his new wife, Emily Threlkeld Ford, to funnel more than $3300 to his protégé. The Trojan Horse moniker definitely fits Nikki Tinker to a T because as her campaign finance report shows, she is a a member in good standing of this right-wing club.

As the moniker from Greek mythology implies, Aunt Nikki is a stealth weapon of the right-wing that optimally would be used to destroy progressive black representation and the social, political, and economic viability of Black Memphis. Unfortunately for our corporate enemies on the right, Aunt Nikki’s campaign exploded today like an IED in a war zone when it released an ad which strikes a note of false religiosity and implies that Steve Cohen is an Jewish interloper unwelcome in black churches and alludes to a bill to protect “religious freedom” and the unfettered right of religious organizations to discriminate against gay and lesbian people. This is the culmination of her clumsy attempts to make inroads with the black ministerial community by pandering to the homophobia of a select group of black pastors.

It looks like the wounds are fatal. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of cynical operators and puppet masters—especially Harold Ford. As of this afternoon, Emily’s List was forced to denounce the ad with egg on their faces. Finally, with the entrance of Black state representative of Joe Towns in this race and the loss of prominent civil rights leaders like Maxine Smith, Aunt Nikki’s fantasy of being the power structure’s corporate mammy in Washington is just 24 hours from a lethal rejection by the voters from which there will be no appeal.

EMILY's List has backed Tinker, and has lost a HUGE amount of credibility in doing so. It really may be one of the most political tone-deaf decisions the organization has made this decade. I hope Skeptical Brotha is right, and that the district's predominantly African American voters stick with Cohen.

For the district's voters, Cohen has, in the past two years, already been quite the upgrade from their previous congressman: Harold Ford, Jr.

While first-term U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen was on the floor of the House on Tuesday, guiding passage of a historic resolution apologizing to African-American citizens for slavery and Jim Crow laws, his most prominent and well-funded Democratic primary opponent was out in the Memphis heat trying to win voters [...]

Cohen likes to argue that voters got a change in 2006, when Harold Ford Jr. took his moderate voting record into a statewide campaign for U.S. Senate and Cohen was sent to Washington with a consistently liberal voting record nearly three decades long. And he relishes pointing to a July 13 debate in which Tinker could not name a vote with which she disagreed.

"In the state Senate, I voted against Confederate license plates when African-American senators voted for them," Cohen said. "I stood up and argued almost singularly against payday loans which wreak havoc against black people. I voted for a felon-rights bill in 1986."

Cohen makes a long list of other instances, as well as macro issues such as health care and tax reform, that he believes would help African-American Memphians.

"These are things I have a gut feeling for," Cohen said. "All these issues may affect African-Americans more than others, but it affects everyone."

To Rhodes College political science professor Marcus Pohlmann, a longtime observer of politics in the Mid-South, Cohen's aggressive advocacy on African-American issues reflects "the peculiar" dynamic of Memphis's 9th District.

"You wouldn't have seen Harold Ford Jr. out front on (the apology resolution)," said Pohlmann, and it is true that Cohen's predecessor did not sign on as co-sponsor to similar slavery apology resolutions in 2000 or in 1997.

"I don't think (Ford Jr.) would have felt the necessity to prove himself to the African-American community in the same way."

Ironies obviously abound, but the district's voters have a true champion in Cohen, and a vile right-wing trojan horse in Tinker. Tonight, the district's voters will have their final say.