Hardly A Candidate for Porkbusters
September 15, 2006 at 5:01 pm
The Hotline’s Jonathan Martin writes in the New Republic on Tennessee State Senator Steve Cohen, who is vying for the seat vacated by fellow Democrat Representative Harold Ford Jr., who is running for Senate.
Should he be elected, Ford will be the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction. Should Cohen be elected, he will be the first Jew ever sent to the House from a majority black district (not to mention the first Jew ever to apply to the CBC [Congressional Black Caucus]). …[He] likens his voting record to that of “a black woman.” A Great Society Democrat in a region that favors New Democrats, he describes himself as “definitely a liberal” in a state that definitely isn’t. Cohen, 57, calls Jackson Browne and Julian Bond friends, admires Barack Obama, Russ Feingold, and George McGovern, and says he loves Memphis’s famed barbecue and ribs “more than anybody.”
richarda said,
September 15, 2006 @ 9:34 pm
I doubt the claim about ‘first Jew in a majority black district’. While Samuel N. Friedel (D - MD 7) was narrowly defeated for renomination in 1968 by black candidate (and ultimately Congressman) Parren J. Mitchell (brother of famous NAACP civil rights lobbyist Clarence Mitchell, Jr.), he had been re-elected in 1966 in the same district, likely just as black then as two years later.