Corker is one of those worthless right-wingers. Votes the party line, ignores his constituents.
The RNC's tactic in 2006 was to run race-baiting ads against Ford (a black or half-black man), which likely did give him the extra couple of percentage points. The full writeup is on Wikipedia (
here).
Lamar Alexander is the other Senator in TN -- he's even more useless.