Cooler heads prevail in Memphis, scurrilous attacks backfire

August 8, 2008

Following up on an item from yesterday, the Democratic primary in Tennessee’s 9th congressional district went well beyond “heated.” Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), who is white and Jewish, was seeking re-election in a predominantly African-American district. Nikki Tinker, whom Cohen defeated in a 2006 primary, was seeking a rematch, and had received support from Emily’s List and some members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Tinker launched some of the ugliest attacks of the 2008 cycle, going after Cohen’s religion, and linking Cohen to the KKK in a television ad.

I’m pleased to note the attacks backfired.

Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) overwhelmingly defeated attorney Nikki Tinker in a racially-charged Democratic primary in Memphis that received national attention.

With 89 percent of precincts reporting, Cohen leads Tinker by a 60-point margin – 79 to 19 percent. The AP has called the race for Cohen. […]

Cohen’s sizable victory suggests that Memphis voters, both black and white, resoundingly rejected Tinker’s campaign tactics.

I think that’s probably fair to say. It’s likely that Cohen would have won the primary anyway, simply by virtue of being an effective member of Congress, but a 4-to-1 margin suggests yesterday was more than just a vote of confidence for Cohen — it was a forceful repudiation of Tinker’s horrid, divisive strategy.

To be sure, negative campaigning can, and usually does, work. Voters say they hate it, but they also tend to remember the attacks, and internalize the negative message.

But there are limits, and candidates who go too far run the risk of, well, failing as miserably as Nikki Tinker did.

Cohen, not surprisingly, was delighted by the results.

“It says that we have come a long, long way and that the people who were counting on racial voting to prevail are thinking of a Memphis that doesn’t exist anymore,” Cohen said. “The people of Memphis are more sophisticated voters that deal with issues and someone’s record and not simply race. And I think it’s a story of America, because I know of no other place in America where there would be such a vote.”

I also enjoyed Oliver Willis’ take, which noted the similarities between Tinker’s tactics and those of Atwater/Rove.

Tinker went right to the playbook of racial and religious bigotry. She tried to set herself up as the authentic sister against the white Jewish interloper. She was easily able to convince increasingly clueless national organizations like Emily’s List to support her simply because of her gender. But something happened. She got her butt kicked. […]

The people of Tennessee’s 9th congressional district looked at the candidates and decided that they would elect one of their own. Their own, in this case, was Rep. Cohen.

Yet again, the people who seek to divide us are, as Stephen Colbert would say, on notice.

Good. ‘Nuff said.

  • Correct me if I’m wrong, but shouldn’t this be “whom Cohen defeated” not “who Cohen defeated”?

    Nikki Tinker, who Cohen had defeated in a 2006 primary…

    Orwell: “If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”

  • Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but I hope this also another repudiation of the self serving fools that have been guiding the DemocratIC party. Call them lieberdems, DLC, corporatists or just Mark Penn, but they seem to be getting their a**es handed to them on a regular basis. Maybe we won’t turn into Republicans after all.

  • here’s hoping this bodes ill for negative campaigning everywhere, especially on the nat’l level.

  • Second star to the right, straight on ’til morning, and we get to leave TinkerHell behind.

    But you’ve got to wonder about those 11,000 who did buy her message. Rush Limbaugh crossovers, maybe?

  • It would be nice to think Nikki Tinker and other politicians contemplating similarly bigoted campaigns learned a valuable lesson from her drubbing but, let’s face it, gutter politics has been around since the first election and it’s here to stay. On a brighter note, at least Ms. Tinker got her @ss handed to her on a platter. I’ll be smiling about that all day.

  • What rarely gets mentioned is that the former Congressman from the district, Harold Ford (R-DNC/’Blue Tick’) contributed to Tinker’s campaign through his wife. Ford beat Cohen for the seat as a wet behind the ears grad from University of Michigan law school.

    The Ford family thinks this seat is a family right and a relative is pulling a Lieberman and running as an independent. Harold Ford, Jr was hoping to use Tinker to finish off Cohen to pave the way for his relative in the general election.

    Steve Cohen has earned the right to serve the district through his service to the district as a State Senator and other positions prior to his election to Congress and has done a fine job. Unlike the Carpetbagger Corporate Lawyer Tinker, he is a product of the local schools and community. Memphis is finally breaking free of the political grip of the Fords, which is a very good thing for everyone BUT the Fords.

    The next time Harold Ford shows his face on TV to push his DLC nonsense while pretending to be a Democrat, someone needs to call him on this.

  • CB:
    You say “To be sure, negative campaigning can, and usually does, work. Voters say they hate it, but they also tend to remember the attacks, and internalize the negative message.”

    And your proof of this is…?

    If you say John Kerry, that sound you hear out your window is my scream of outrage coming all the way from Brooklyn to Vermont. I still insist that, if anything, the swiftboating might have been the reason the election was as close as it was. But even accepting that it was effective in this case, it would go to my own theory:

    Negative ads work only if they are used against a candidate who voters are ready to dislike anyway, and who does not have a program they like — or does not present it in a positive way. Kerry came across as a stiff, unlikeable person — and yes, ‘likability’ is an important trait in a President — whose program was little more than “Bush-lite” (since, remember, ‘liberals are losers’ according to the DLC types) and whose own campaign was also negative.

    We confuse ‘negative’ with ‘scurrilous’ too often. Negative means ‘Vote for me because I’m not my opponent’ or ‘vote against my opponent, and, since I’m the only other choice…’ And, because Kerry didn’t dare run on his (sshhhhh) liberalism all he had as a positive to run on was his history as a ‘war hero.’ Meanwhile, he had the weakness of being closely tied to someone who was a ‘hate-object’ for Conservatives, his senior colleague. Still, he almost won, and because so many of us, rightly, hate and denigrate George Bush, we can’t believe that people were actually voting for him, and some of his policies. (Bad policies, yes, but real ones that appealed to a lot of people — no, Tom C., not all of whom were ‘drooling retards.’)

    Kerry didn’t really challenge him on the war strongly enough, partially because he had voted for it. (And partially because the disaster it would be wasn’t fully evident. Many people still were traumatized by 9/11 and were willing to ‘do something, anything’ to avoid it. And ‘war hysteria’ makes people do crazy things — FDR and Earl Warren both supported ‘Japanese relocation’ and Humphrey supported some of the worst Cold War legislation.) Kerry didn’t challenge him on his religious policies, pointing out that the ‘Christians’ Bush supported were (and are) a minority of Christians, noisy, but still a minority, didn’t show how Bush’s policies and beliefs were opposed by most main-stream Protestant groups. Kerry couldn’t challenge him on his economic idiocies, because that would remind people that Kerry really was a (shudder) liberal.

    All he had was his ‘war hero’ status — hmm, sounds familiar, somebody else is running on trhat this year, now who is it? So if that was punctured, there was no reason to vote for such a wooden character.

    There are even better relatively recent examples, but let’s put them into the next comment.

  • …increasingly clueless national organizations like Emily’s List…

    What’s their problem these days? Their mission to get more pro-choice women elected is a great one, but other issues and character should count as well. I wish they’d raise the bar a little.

  • Irony is a group of local grassroots activits women (can you say PRIOR donors to Emily’s List) TRIED to warn Emily’s List about Tinker Bell in March 2008….said people were basically told to mind their own business. Bet some folks at EL wish they had paid attention to the “rubes” in Memphis!

  • I want to focus on the Presidential elections of 76, 84, and 88, but first, another reminder of the ‘success’ of negative campaining from 1970. The Nixon Administration convinced two ‘centrist’ Republican House members — one of whom was Rumsfeld who had been centrist in the House, can’t remember who the other was — to give up safe seats and to run against Democratic Senators, only to let Washington run their campaign. They ran a relentlessly “Agnewian” campaign — and were crushed, against not the strongest Democrats.

    (For that matter, to jump to current days, how well did the Republican attacks work in the strongly Republican districts where by-elections were run?)

    But look at the 3 Presidential elections.

    In 1976, the Democrats should have scored a monumental victory. They’d won a large majority in 1974, before Nixon was impeached and resigned. The Republicans were running Gerald Ford, who — before he was named as Agnew’s successor — no one considered suitable for national office, not even himself. The war was over — it had ended badly, but that was a great weapon against the Republicans and Nixon’s ‘secret plan to end the war.’ (Compare that to Eisenhower’s successful ending of Korea, or later, Bush I’s even more successful ending to the Kuwait War — the aftermath was bad, but the war was ended successfully because Daddy Bush didn’t try and overthrow Saddam.)

    But the Democrats were still traumatized by McGovern’s loss, and the ‘success’ of the Southern Strategy, and Chappaquidick had taken Ted Kennedy out of the running. They picked Jimmy Carter — who was, in fact, a liberal, but who ran simply as the anti-Nixon, a pure ‘negative’ campaign. (Remember my distinction between ‘negative’ and scurrilous.) He didn’t connect with people, his Southernness and strong Christiantity weren’t understood by many in the North, and his style and his only campaign theme “I’ll never lie to you” made him look weak. Somehow he almost managed the miracle of losing to Gerald Ford — who hadn’t been as bad as predicted and was also ‘no Nixon.’

    As a President he did seem weak, and the Iran Hostage Crisis — as much a ‘liberal blunder’ as was Vietnam, since we knew the Shah was bad and assumed that if we helped him be overthrown a moderate Democratic regime would succeed him, not that crazy cleric with the videotapes — emphasized it, as did his failure to succeed in his rescue attempt. But Reagan didn’t run as the ‘anti-Carter.’ As Obama rightly pointed out, he ran on ideas, on principles. (Bad ones, yes, and insincere ones, yes, but on ideas — while Carter was still running away from being called a ‘liberal,’ and the challenge of Kennedy hurt his liberal support without helping him against Reagan. (And note that Republicans didn’t run a negative campaign against Carter but a positive one for Reagan.)

    Reagan won. I’ll skip over 1984 because nobody could have beaten Reagan that year — though it’s worth pointing out that when the Democrats decided to pick a woman VP they picked ‘Archie Bunker’s Congresswoman’ with serious ethical issues herself and with her husband, managing to get the worst of both worlds.

    Then came 1988 and Mike Dukakis, a bumbling clown whose positive policy was, in fact, Republican-lite, who ran on the “Massachussetts Miracle” (like most miracles it was a ‘seven day’s wonder’ and had disappeared long before the election) that came across as the Democratic equivalent of ‘greed is good’ — it wasn’t, but Dukakis never managed to show this. The Democrats ‘went negative’ against him, but they merely built on the public’s perception of him. (He almost made me vote Republican for the only time in a National election — and if it hadn’t been for Dan Quayle, I might have.)

    Then, just to finish it, the Democrats ran Bill Clinton, who ran a positive campaign, gave people reasons to vote FOR him instead of just AGAINSt Bush. And he won — what a surprise!

  • Good for those voters.

    I’ve stopped giving to EMILY’s list, after years of supporting them. I still read their info, but make donations to pro-choice candidates– of both genders– based on my own research and information.

  • Good for Memphis. As for Emily’s List… I stopped giving them money a while ago but, like True (@13), still read their info and, occasionally, supported individual candidates featured there. Yesterday, I unsubscribed altogether. I can give more through Act Blue or through DNC (now that Dean is at the helm of it and doing a super job).

    NoPCZone, @7,

    I thought Harold was a swinging bachelor, thus making the “Harold, call me” smear more credible?

  • I also enjoyed Oliver Willis’ take, which noted the similarities between Tinker’s tactics and those of Atwater/Rove.

    Tinker went right to the playbook of racial and religious bigotry. She tried to set herself up as the authentic sister against the white Jewish interloper. She was easily able to convince increasingly clueless national organizations like Emily’s List to support her simply because of her gender. But something happened. She got her butt kicked. […]

    Ah, the boyz weigh-in: “Increasingly clueless national organization like Emily’s List…” – which is hilarious. I guess it must set their iddy, biddy penises on fire whenever a group like Emily’s endorses “women” because of their gender.

    The boyz have been doing this shit for years. Lay off the geeky dude drama about good women’s organizations supporting women candidates.

    And, BTW: EMILY’s is horrified and embarrassed by what Tinker did. OTOH, consider that it must be apparently okay for somebody like Cohen to be a sexist (his reprehensible comments about Hillary Clinton during the primaries). And where were the boyz when this was taking place? Silent.

    Oh, I get it: it’s WRONG, WRONG, WRONG to use racist and anti-semitic comments, but it’s OKAY to demean women. I shoulda known. Boyz will be boyz…

  • Steve Cohen is definitely not a sexist or a racist. He is Tennessee’s
    and indeed one of the nation’s most progressive congresspeople. I
    will wager that the majority of thinking women, black, white or what
    ever voted for Steve Cohen. He makes me proud to be a Tennessean!

  • And, BTW: EMILY’s is horrified and embarrassed by what Tinker did. — MaBelle, @17

    Yeah, sure. *After* everyone else — including Obama — had noticed how their double criterion (woman. pro-choice. brains and ethics optional) had misfired, miserably.

    Cohen had been doing a very good job in Congress; why support a fratricidal primary against him (and con money out of your followers)? Because she’ got a slit and he’s got a sac? Either one — if it’s *the only one* — is a piss-poor “qualification” for office.

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