Cynthia McKinney - The Great Green Hope?

I have great respect and appreciation for Cynthia McKinney but I said long before the Green Convention in Reading, PA that she would make a terrible Green candidate because she would be written off as a "cop-slapper" and a "conspiracy theorist" by the mainstream media (if they bothered to pay any attention to her at all). The mainstream media virtually ignored her recent visit to Madison, Wisconsin (which only 30 Greens bothered to attend). I googled the event looking for mainstream coverage and honestly didn't find much, if any. Even the blogs and the small local media (see below) opened their pieces with "cop-slapper" and "conspiracy theorist" and dug no deeper. What are we thinking, fellow Greens?

I am very curious what good is to come out of supporting a campaign which, just like in 2004, we are the only ones paying any attention to? I stress that it is not my desire that things work this way, but I know that they DO. A McKinney run may be well-intended but will do nothing to help advance our party at all. In fact, our numbers will drop again. All those on Cynthia's

bandwagon have consistently explained that a young energetic go-getter like her will help us to organize locals with her vigorous campaigning (I guess that they intend their "young" dagger to penetrate the spine of that notoriously "lazy" old white man who gave our party its national legs). I can only say that simple mathematics proves them terribly wrong.

Just to put things in perspective, the Madison Metro Area is home to over 600,000 people. Thirty of them showed up to see Cynthia, a statistically irrelevant number.

I live in a small city in upstate New York (Glens Falls). We are home to about 15,000 people and its arguable that there are about 100,000 people living within about a 20 mile radius. There are no major single pockets of population anywhere up here. I brought Ralph here twice and he spoke to over 300 people each time and we easily sold out ($50 - $100 p.p.) fundraisers for him. The local press hate my guts but we got covered by the local papers and the local indie TV stations and Time Warner and the local public radio affiliate each time, nonetheless.

My Green local is literally a handful of people and I am absolutely sure that we are nowhere near as well-organized and well-run as I imagine the Wisconsin Greens to be. So, what does this tell us about Cynthia's "bankability" and effectiveness at garnering media interest and buzz and getting people interested in our party?

It tells me I was right, regardless of what our internally-produced, seldom read, press releases have to say about it. Please think of the party as we work towards the 2008 presidential elections. Please work for the only candidate who has shown over and over again that he is the only representative our party has ever had who is capable of getting decent, quite often national, coverage. Please help me to save our party by working to help Ralph Nader become our candidate for President. It is the only thing that makes any sense. Everything else is just electoral masturbation.

http://www.madison.com/tct/news/261690

A former U.S. Congresswoman from Georgia, perhaps best known for her scuffle with U.S. Capitol security guards, was in Madison on Tuesday stumping as a Green Party candidate for president.

http://racinepost.blogspot.com/2007/12/mckinney-coming-to-wisconsin-seeks.html

McKinney? Cynthia McKinney... that Cynthia McKinney? None other. She's the congresswoman who walked around the metal detector at the entrance to the House Office Building, while not wearing her Congressional identity pin, and then got into a shoving match with the Capitol guard who tried to stop her. She's the congresswoman who's made statements accusing President Bush of involvement with 9/11. She's opposed aid to Israel, and anti-Semitic statements have repeatedly come from her campaigns.

http://www.wsbtv.com/news/14829074/detail.html

McKinney is seeking the nomination of the Green Party, which gained fame when Ralph Nader ran as its candidate for president in 2000. Kevin Barrett, a former University of Wisconsin lecturer who taught that the U.S. government was behind the September 11th terrorist attacks, attended McKinney's news conference along with about 50 others.

A Response to Some Greens About 2008

We simply cannot afford to make the same mistake again of thinking that a campaign virtually ignored by the media can also be a success for our party. A campaign that fails to be noticed is a failure for our party as it does not help us to build. Party-building is the main reason we run presidential campaigns in the first place, right?

We need to focus on the very real media blackout that exists and how to break it. A candidate who can get national media attention will yield us more membership and more resource and the possibilities of eventually gaining more ballot lines, the fabled 5% and access to the debates.

Lets all keep our eyes on that prize: NATIONAL MEDIA ATTENTION. The common ground here is that we all want the Green Party to grow and become the legitimate and credible alternative to the two corporate war parties, right? Is there anybody out there who disagrees? That said, no one person is even contemplating running with us who will get us the media attention that Ralph Nader will. That is simply a fact and we all know it to be true no matter our whims, desires, moods or strategies.

We need to stop arguing about the "who" immediately. If Nader seeks our nomination, he will get it. Saturday night in Reading was proof positive that the grassroots and their representatives know exactly what we need to do in 2008. We love Ralph, we respect him and we want him to run. The energy is there. The only pertinent question is, "Are we able to show a credible candidate (like Ralph) that we are a party deserving enough that legitimate candidates would seriously consider seeking our nomination?" We need to convince Ralph to run with us. Waiting for an under qualified or lesser-known candidate to beg for our nomination seems to suggest a secret desire for our party to fail.

Running a Green who no-one knows is always going to be a serious mistake. We already made it once and we all seem to agree that it was, at the very least, not a party-building experience. As such, lets not do it again. Most people I know who are not Greens think that Ralph Nader was our candidate in 2004, anyway. They have no idea who our actual candidate was because he (and our party) didn't get any media attention.

Running a Democrat who garners only small amounts of very negative media would be a huge mistake, as well. Cynthia McKinney is a wonderful, brave and articulate woman who deserves our support BUT she is also a Democrat and she also has the rare distinction of being thought of as a loose cannon and a conspiracy theorist by both the Fox News crowd AND the NY Time's crowd, as well. She is not anywhere as well known as Ralph and her resume is considerably shorter. Running her would be a terrible mistake (and it will split our party again).

Run her for Congress as a Green and run Ralph for President. This is a no-brainer. I don't know about you, but I'll throw my resource behind both campaigns, enthusiastically.

I am not holding up a gun and saying "Just do what I tell you". I'm not threatening to "take my ball and go home". I'm just predicting what will happen (again) if we proceed slowly and without common sense. I am stating the obvious. 2008, with Bloomberg in the race, is our year. This is the year to run Ralph and grow our party again. If we start planning early enough, we can make this our best national campaign ever. I am not proud to say that I predicted 2004's disastrous result perfectly, but I did. I believe that 90% of the grassroots Greens I know did as well. For the good of the party, we need to go with the positive.

Ralph for President. Cynthia for Congress. Both with our full support. This time around, I would love to predict that we're going to stop all the infighting and announce our intent early and do something that makes sense. We owe it to our grassroots and we owe it to ourselves. We can do it. I predict that we will!