Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, waded into the ugly politics being waged in today’s Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District’s Democratic primary.

“These incendiary and personal attacks have no place in our politics,” Obama said in a statement, “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.”

Interestingly, Obama was referring to attacks being waged against the white incumbent, Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., by an African-American challenger, corporate attorney Nikki Tinker.

Tinker has been accused of playing some of the more ugly racial politics of the campaign season.

She put the image of a Klansman standing before a burning cross in a TV ad to drive home the point that Cohen, as a member of the downtown development board in 2005, opposed renaming a park that is named for Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a founder of the Ku Klux Klan. (Watch the ad HERE.)