A Victory For Progressives And A Defeat For Identity Politics

Last night in southwestern Tennessee a great thing happened. An incumbent progressive Democrat with a long record of supporting civil rights won his primary. What makes this especially important is that the incumbent, Rep. Steve Cohen, is white, running in a district with a 60% black population, against Nikki Tinker, a conservative black corporate lawyer who did everything she could to make race an issue in the campaign.

To give you an idea how nasty the campaign got, Tinker actually ran an ad juxtaposing Cohen with the KKK, complete with burning cross. Her campaign also openly asserted that the district should be represented by a black person. She released another ad, this one attacking Cohen's religious affiliation (he is Jewish), making a point of highlighting how he isn't part of "our churches". This latest ad provoked a bit of backlash, and even Obama came out to condemn it:

These incendiary and personal attacks have no place in our politics, and will do nothing to help the good people of Tennessee. It's time to turn the page on a politics driven by negativity and division so that we can come together to lift up our communities and our country.

In the end, the people of Tennessee's 9th district voted overwhelmingly in favor of Cohen, rejecting Tinker by an incredible 60% margin. It was a great victory for post-racial politics in the face of despicable race-baiting and assorted bigotry.

So who are the losers in this? And there are losers. First and foremost, Tinker obviously comes out on the bottom. She ran a nasty campaign, the kind of campaign I'd expect from the Republicans, not a Democrat. This not only goes for her bigoted attacks, but also for her attacks on policy, which were also straight from the Right.

The second is DLC Chair and corporate Democrat Harold Ford Jr., who supported Tinker's nasty campaign and backwards policies against a good Democrat. We can't be certain that his support was based solely on her race, because the DLC is good at supporting crappy Republican-leaning Democrats, but regardless of his motivations, he gave Tinker his endorsement, and he put his local political machine behind her campaign, and she was still rejected by a landslide.

The third loser, and the one that really bothers me, is Emily's List. Emily's List's mission is to support female pro-choice candidates, which is fine, we need more diversity of representation in Congress, and more supporters of reproductive rights. However Emily's List bothers me because their support typically rests on one thing: does the candidate have a vagina? That is all that matters to them, and I think that mentality is the antithesis of feminism. Women didn't fight for suffrage simply to give up their independent thought to vote solely on the basis of gender. Yet that is what Emily's List stands for, and they have a history of helping female Democrats attack perfectly good pro-choice fellow Democrats all based on gender. In this case, Emily's List stood by and supported, and funded, Tinker's nasty campaign against Cohen. Cohen, is pro-choice. Tinker, does not support abortion, although she says she thinks the government should stay out of it. No one likes abortion, but Tinker is at best barely pro-choice, whereas Cohen is fully pro-choice. Yet Emily's List still endorsed Tinker, because of her gender, against someone with a BETTER record on reproductive rights. That's messed up. That's despicable.

I'd like to think that Emily's List would learn its lesson and stop making their decisions based solely on gender, and quit attacking Democrats with strong records on reproductive rights. Emily's List should be ashamed.