Joseph Knippenberg- Cynthia McKinney: Going, Going, Gone?

The American Enterprise
2 August 2006

Earlier this year, I received my new voter registration card, informing me that my house was now located in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, represented by Republican Tom Price, instead of the Fourth, which had been reclaimed by Cynthia McKinney after a two-year absence. Having been ignored by her for the better part of ten years, I was then only too happy for the Republican-controlled state legislature to work its redistricting magic, moving my little, largely Republican enclave out of a heavily Democratic district and into one where the member’s office might actually return my phone calls. (For the record, Rep. Price’s office answers emails with some alacrity.)

Now, however, I’m longing for the bad old days, for I might have had the chance again to boot McKinney out of office, perhaps this time for good.

We seized our first opportunity in 2002, when Denise Majette, with the assistance of many “malicious” crossover voters like me, unseated McKinney in the Democratic primary. But Majette, a conventionally liberal African-American Democrat, abandoned what could have been a safe seat to make a quixotic run for the Senate seat now held by Republican Johnny Isakson, paving the way for McKinney’s return.

Some thought that McKinney might have learned from her defeat to keep her head down and attend to the bread-and-butter, bricks-and-mortar needs of her “mature” suburban district—the Atlanta analogue of Maryland’s Prince Georges County, with decaying close-in suburban communities, uneven economic development, and a rapidly growing African-American middle- and upper-middle-class population. Indeed, in the Georgia delegation there are models she could have emulated—if not John Lewis, whose impressive biography makes him beyond reproach, then Sanford Bishop and David Scott, who quietly but effectively represent diverse constituencies.

No such luck.

With Cynthia McKinney, what we saw before is what we got back. Her current campaign is classic McKinney, with a website containing dark insinuations about voting machine malfunctions in the July 18th primary, a letter accusing the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s impeccably liberal editor Cynthia Tucker of writing a libelous column this past Sunday, and lots of links to various “alternative” “news” websites, as well as to two documentaries dealing with her favorite themes (voting fraud and 9/11 conspiracies). On the night of the primary election, the guest of honor at her campaign party was Cindy Sheehan.

Now, however well this might play in certain hard left precincts of the Democratic Party, I’m not sure it will stand her in good stead in her district. Having failed to garner the necessary majority in a three-way primary race, she faces a run-off challenge from the newly invigorated campaign of Hank Johnson, twice elected to the Dekalb County Commission from a constituency that comprises a substantial portion of the Fourth District. A recent poll gave Johnson a double-digit lead over McKinney, and an analysis of last month’s election returns showed her losing strength in her traditional strongholds.

Of course, in a low-turnout run-off, anything can happen. McKinney’s organization, cultivated over twelve years, ought to stand her in good stead. She ought to be able to get her loyalists to the polls. But, not surprisingly, money has been flowing into Johnson’s campaign coffers. And while McKinney has gotten some high-profile endorsements, so has Johnson. Perhaps most important, however, are the Georgia campaign laws, about which McKinney constantly complains. Georgia permits open primary voting and does not require voters to declare a party affiliation when they register. All they must do when they vote is request one or the other party ballot, which means that anyone can be a “Republican” or a “Democrat” for a day. To be sure, those who selected Republican ballots on July 18th can’t turn around and request a Democratic ballot on August 8th, but there are surely more than a few first-round non-voters who might be motivated to the polls with the prospect of booting McKinney from office.

These challenges have led McKinney to go negative with a campaign ad accusing Johnson of ethics violations and financial misconduct, charges she repeated at every opportunity during Monday evening’s televised debate. She also accused him of being, in effect, a Republican, since he had attracted some contributions from prominent Republicans and evinced a willingness to work with colleagues across the aisle to get things done.

Johnson, a mild-mannered and plodding campaigner whose voting record on matters that actually come before Congress would likely not be very different from McKinney’s (save perhaps in one respect, noted below), responded in the debate by calling attention to the out-of-state money she has attracted. If, as she implied, politicians do the bidding of their donors, whose interests will McKinney be serving? I wish that Johnson had gone for the jugular here. He could have noted, as did Daniel Pipes during the 2004 election campaign, that a substantial portion of McKinney’s reportable individual contributions during this election cycle came from Arab- and Muslim-Americans, most of whom were out-of-state. Why, he might have asked, are they so interested in supporting McKinney?

Indeed, by comparison with McKinney, Johnson is a paragon of moderation on the Iraq war. We should pull out, he says, “as soon as is possible, sensible, and ethical.” He continues, “When our military experts advise that Iraq is a more stable and viable state, we should begin to disengage and bring our men and women home as quickly as possible.”

But Johnson’s strategy is not to focus on national issues, but rather to be the anti-McKinney, insisting that he will scrupulously pay attention to the needs of the district and work across party lines for its sake. Rather than playing to an extremist national stage, winning plaudits in Ithaca and Berkeley, he’ll pay attention to the folks in Decatur, Lithonia, and Conyers.

McKinney counters by claiming that Congress.org ranked her the most “powerful” Democrat in the Georgia delegation, exceeding even John Lewis in influence and stature. As if. The rankings I find have her near the bottom of the delegation, which is what I would have expected of someone with her meager record of legislative accomplishment and extraordinary capacity for embarrassing herself and her colleagues.

McKinney may have reached the end of the line. Perhaps she’ll find the time to finish her doctoral dissertation and find a place in an institution where her views are closer to the mainstream. Come to think of it, in her last spell out of office, she had a named professorship at Cornell. I wonder if they’d take her back?

But I wouldn’t wish that on anyone anywhere.

Joseph Knippenberg is a professor of politics and associate provost for student achievement at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. He is a weekly columnist for The American Enterprise Online and a contributing blogger at No Left Turns.