Green Party Looks to McKinney in 2004

by Thom White

LOS ANGELES -- May 20, 2003 -- The Green Party gained national recognition with Ralph Nader's run for the presidency in 2000. Greens had strong showings in elections in California and other liberal centers, causing establishment Democrats to cite Americans who had "wasted their votes" on the Green Party as a factor leading to Al Gore's defeat.

It was clear that many voters disillusioned with Democratic Party conduct in the 1990s turned to the Green Party in 2000. And if Green Party activists have their way, many more will turn Green in 2004, with ex-Congressman Cynthia McKinney at the top of the presidential ticket to challenge George W. Bush.

Donna J. Warren, Green Party candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California in the last general election, co-wrote an essay appearing in the December 2002 issue of Change-Links, that strongly supports a potential run for the presidency by Miss McKinney, who was defeated in a Democratic primary last August 2002.

In "Turning the Green Party Black," Warren began with an introduction: "My name is Donna, and I once had an addiction problem. I was addicted to the Democratic Party." She goes on to describe her conversion to Greenism because the Green Party "is about more than the environment. It's also about social justice."

Fellow activist Dr. Jonathan Finley, co-author of the piece, himself became a "true believer when someone told him that the Green Party supported reparations for slavery," a stand Miss McKinney has taken as well.

Warren describes "a powerful 'McKinney for President' movement … growing within the Green Party" because of McKinney's strong stand for "social justice."

But who is this Miss Cynthia McKinney who wants to be president?

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During the months after Terrible Tuesday, as reasonable & patriotic commentators called for bloodthirsty revenge as the only remedy for America's day of black horror, Representative Cynthia McKinney of Georgia obstreperously dissented against the President's actions, and earned herself scores of enemies among the pro-war factions coale-scing around George Bush's recently declared (but long ago formulated) "War on Terror."

Cynthia McKinney was known as one of the more "progressive" members of Congress during her five terms in the US House of Representatives. She had first criticized American foreign policy in the Middle East in 1991, when she denounced the "liberation" of Kuwait while in the Georgia State Assembly. McKinney spoke regularly of the ill-treatment non-Jews were receiving in occupied Palestine at the hands of the Israeli Defense Force, and joined others in support of an independent Palestinian state.

Miss McKinney made national headlines in 2002 for a March 24 interview with Pacifica radio (Berkeley) in which she rhetorically asked, "What did this administration know and when did it know it, about the events of September 11th? Who else knew, and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered?" She then went on to comment that, "What is undeniable is that corporations close to the administration have directly benefited from the increased defense spending arising from the aftermath of September 11th."

It was remarkable at the time when Americans "stood united," for an elected representative to open up such a serious can of worms, questioning the motivations behind the President's call for increased national "offense" capacity to wage a Terror War and take the battle to the "terrorists who hate us for our freedom."

In the days following her statements, mass media sheep bleated with incredulous cries of "conspiracy theory" and Bush Democrat Zell Miller called her crazy. But Miss McKinney refused to issue any public apology, and stood firmly by her remarks. Though she had been tolerated for ten years now, McKinney's time was now up as the not-so-stealth money campaign coor-dinated by the lobbying organization AIPAC to rid the Democratic Party of this antiwar plague would begin in earnest.

In the weeks leading up to the August 20 Democratic primary, the Atlanta Constitution-Journal and local media published reports of McKinney's Arab connections, and always inplied that these donors had "links to terrorism."

In the final count, incumbent Cynthia McKinney was trounced by well-funded upstart Denise Majette in the primary election. McKinney lost by nearly 20,000 votes to Majette, a former judge who received twice as much funding as McKinney ($1.9 million to $800,000) with an impressive number of individual contributions from Jews across America.

On the August 21 ABC World News Tonight, Canadian journalist Peter Jennings described the unexpected results of the primary: "Democrat Cynthia McKinney was a vocal critic of President Bush's Middle East policy. She was beaten by another Democrat who got large donations from out-of-state supporters of Israel."

Washington Post reporter Edward Walsh confirmed that: "Jewish donors and pro-Israel organizations from around the country poured money into Majette's campaign, while most of McKinney's contributions came from donors with Muslim or Arab surnames who live outside the district."

Indeed, McKinney received contributions from many Saudi groups during the 2001-02 election cycle, and was the only elected official to speak at a pro-Palestinian march in Washington, D.C., organized by the socialist group, International ANSWER, on April 20, 2002.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, an Islamic advocacy group, had called for members to support McKinney in the primary with a list of the U.S. Rep's stances on key issues: "Pro-Muslim candidate. Supporter of Palestinian state for over seven years. Against secret evidence. Against aid to Israel."

The action to remove from contention McKinney, a candidate with notable support from Saudi and Muslim interest groups, was coordinated by AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), and made for one of the first instances where the conflict over Jewish colonization of the Holy Land came home to be fought on American soil, this time as a "funding war" between Muslim and Jewish interests.

One insightful observer points out, however, that, aside from the Arab-Israeli angle that impacted this contest, the McKinney campaign's own missteps were decisive in the crushing defeat.

Bruce A. Dixon, a political "consultant" from Chicago with apparent expertise in American campaign warfare, and a volunteer for McKinney during the last ten days before the primary, produced a thoughtful analysis of the 2002 McKinney campaign, entitling his judgment, Internal Factors in the McKinney Campaign Contributed to Her Loss. And Ours. Dixon's essay is fundamentally sympathetic to Miss McKinney but uncomplimentary of the candidate's campaign strategy, tactics, and execution.

McKinney's team appears to have been unprepared for the unusual primary face-off with Denise Majette, a "well-funded right wing black surrogate," and was instead busy preparing for the general election against whoever the white Republican would be that year, according to Dixon.

"A right wing black female opponent who can match your TV time and has the open support of all the major media will inevitably claim a piece of your base vote," warns Dixon, while affirming that this could have been overcome had McKinney's campaign carried out effective field operations in the precinct in the months before the election.

Through more effective door-to-door and telephone canvassing, and "voter registration drives" to actually connect with the community and counterbalance the "almost universal hostility of the mass media," McKinney, as the incumbent, would have stood a reasonable chance of overcoming the myriad factors against her.

But the author offered this example of poor field operations strategy by McKinney. He described how, after canvassing the precinct to register voters, he was told that the McKinney campaign did not "bother with apartment buildings. They don't come out for Cynthia. We concentrate on the houses."

Had the campaign focused on (or paid attention to) the thousands of potential voters in apartments, Dixon estimates that, "from April on, the McKinney forces should have been able to register 8,000 to 10,000 new voters." Those thousands of people then could have been called in the days leading up to the primary, and reminded of the election and of what a great idea it would be to "Vote Cynthia."

The author does cite apparently high Republican "cross-over" turnout, "the avalanche of outside money from right wing and pro-Zionist organizations into the coffers of McKinney's opponent," and the fact that "the media savaged" the candidate with innuendo about her "potential links to terrorism," but says that, with a loss by 20,000 votes, the McKinney campaign bore ultimate responsibility for failing to pull off a primary win.

Other American politicians have suffered big electoral defeats, only to roar back and win again. A successful Green Party run for President by Miss McKinney in 2004 will put her in the esteemed company of important American politicos like Richard "Dick" Nixon and William "Bill" Clinton.

But however one estimates the potential fortunes of Cynthia McKinney, the stunning and over-whelming defeat of a five-term incumbent like her should demonstrate to Americans who wonder how the Arab-Israeli conflict affects their lives that this not-so-distant conflict can be, even in unlikely places such as Georgia's Fourth District, an important factor determining our free elections.

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