BY
JACKSON BAKER |
JULY 21, 2007
It is surely obvious by now that 9th District
congressman Steve Cohen is going to be a frequent flyer on YouTube and the network
and cable broadcasts and, for that matter, via choice quotations in major
newspapers and magazines. All that is assured by the longtime state senator’s
stage presence, his concern for timely issues, and the way with words which
caused The Tennessee Journal recently to lament the absence of “the
wittiest” member of the state legislature.
Add to that an apparent instinct for finding his mark among
the national capital’s power players and on the crowded Beltway media stage and
what can only be described as an innate anti-bashfulness, and you begin to see
why Cohen is rapidly putting in the shade the admittedly impressive benchmarks
for celebrity established by his predecessor, former Rep. Harold Ford Jr.
Well, it can’t be said that Cohen isn’t also making a
serious effort to touch all the bases important to his constituency. Make that
“constituencies.” The congressman’s appearance at a press conference in front
of the federal building on Friday highlighted several major issues –
each relating to a different component of the base that he hopes will reelect
him next year.
The stated purpose of the press
conference was to announce a just-enacted congressional increase in the minimum
wage. Backed up by the likes of local AFSCME director Dorothy Crook, and Rebekah Jordan of the
Mid-South Interfaith Network for Economic Justice, Cohen laid out the facts:
Working full time at the minimum-wage level that has held for the last decade
($5.15), a head of household can make no more than $10,700 a year – “nearly
$6,000 below the poverty level for a family of three.”
The ‘Rising Tide’ Effect
As presidential
candidate John Edwards had noted pointedly on his visit to Memphis last Monday
night, Memphis – and the 9th District portion of it, in particular –
is among the poorest per capita areas in the United States. The legislation
just passed won’t change the fact, but it will, as Cohen pointed out Friday,
make a dent in it. The first of three minimum-wage increases, to $5.85, will
take place next week, and it will be followed by two more 70-cent increases, in
July 2008 and July 2009, respectively.
In two years’ time,
that will make the new minimum wage $7.25. Even adjusting for inflation and
other factors, that’s a real increase – one that, as Cohen and the other
speakers noted, increases 115,000 Tennesseans directly and 350,000 altogether,
considering the “rising tide” effect on incomes in general. African Americans,
as Cohen said, will be major beneficiaries.
Though Cohen wasn’t
the author of the legislation, he has been an insistent supporter of
minimum-wage increases, both as a state senator and as a congressman. As Crook
pointed out, in words that were surely welcomed by the first-term congressman
facing reelection next year, “In Nashville you worked hard for it, and I knew
you would work hard for it in Washington.”
Score one for the
poor working folks of the 9th District.
Cohen took the
opportunity at his press conference to declare his having had an influential
role, along with his Nashville Democratic counterpart, Jim Cooper, in securing
new funding for historically black colleges in the amount of $100 million ,
with another $25 million destined for graduate schools. What that meant for
Memphis’ financially beleaguered LeMoyne-Owen College, Cohen said, was no less
than $500,000, a windfall sum for an institution struggling to stay alive.
Score one for a
venerable institution considered central to the city’s indigenous
African-American culture.
A Line in the Sand
More? Cohen was asked at
the press conference about another issue of more than usual importance to the
white progressives who have formed a major and vocal part of his voter base over
the years, never more so than in 2006 when, through their blogging arm, they
went on offense against his major election foes. The Memphis congressman is one
of 70 House members who wrote a letter to President Bush declaring that they “will only support
appropriating additional funds for U.S. military operations in Iraq during
Fiscal Year 2008 and beyond for the protection and safe redeployment of all our
troops out of Iraq before you leave office.”
Cohen, describing the resolve as a
“line in the sand,” made it clear that he and the 69 others (all Democrats
except for maverick presidential candidate Ron Paul, a Republican) think the
time is long gone for half measures, including some still favored by the congressional
Democratic leadership as well as a plan put forward by Tennessee Senator Lamar
Alexander based on the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.
Score one for the congressman’s
traditional liberal base in Midtown and East Memphis.
And at least two other recent
Cohen efforts were responsible for some still discernible quantum waves. This
past week he joined with Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton,
chair of a House Transportation subcommittee overseeing FEMA, in a widely noted
letter blasting the agency for wasting $67 million worth of ice that was meant
for Katrina rescue but never got used.
Score one for the
foes of governmental inefficiency, particularly as evidenced by the Bush
administration’s Katrina failures; that rather large category transcends party
and race factors.
And there was FedEx
chairman Fred Smith up there in Washington last week personally testifying
before a Senate
Finance Energy and Infrastructure subcommittee about his opposition to removing
FedEx ground workers from the purview of the Railway Labor Act for collective
bargaining purposes.
That was a
reminder of Cohen’s recent highly public break with other Democrats and with his
normal labor allies in opposing passage of a House bill that contained the
provision disliked by Smith but openly coveted by FedEx rival UPS and by the
Teamsters union. Cohen’s stance was a clear indication that he won’t let
ideology stand in the way of service to his district’s major employer.
Score
one for big local employer FedEx and for Cohen’s grasp of economic realpolitik.
‘It’s logical. It’s humane’
As recently as
this weekend, Cohen, after being acquainted with the plight of foreign parents
whose tourist visas in the United States will expire before they can complete
medical care for their children, proposed a bill that would grant them special
work permits to extend their stay and assist in financing the children’s
treatments, many of them at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
“I should hope it
would have support. It’s logical, it’s humane,” Cohen was quoted by USA Today.
“I can’t imagine anyone thinking this would be a security risk. It’s just a
humanitarian issue.”
Score one for a
major local hospital and for humanitarianism at large.
All in all, the
congressman who has clearly devoted much energy and effort to raising his
profile in the national consciousness has arguably been no less diligent in
seeing to causes and issues that affect the people he was elected to represent.
And the diversity of his efforts is impressive, as it was when, in the state
Senate, he mixed gun-carry bills and liberalized drink measures in with the
standard bread-and-butter positions expected of any card-carrying liberal
Democrat.
(Some of that
diversity may, of course, become fodder for Cohen’s declared and potential
adversaries – though it is hard to see how corporate attorney Nikki Tinker, say,
could exploit the FedEx issue in her renewed efforts to seek the 9th
District seat in 2008.)
Opponents may –
and probably will – say that the congressman’s motives on the legislative and
constituent fronts are largely, if not completely, political. Maybe so, maybe
no; in any case, one hears that politicians customarily do just that – practice
politics; indeed, they presumably are elected to do that.
And the last
several days have contained several practical demonstrations that Steve Cohen,
no mere talking head he, knows how to do it.
