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Dreaming Green (cont’d)
Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney emphasizes her goal: 5 percent of the votes.
With what this Democrat-controlled Congress is doing, I think it's clear: we have no opposition party in the United States.
But Cynthia McKinney soon has other things on her mind, as the photo shoot gets going. Smiling, dancing, and posing the afternoon away, she waves her hand to the camera with fingers spread out to show the “five” she is asking for in November.
McKinney seems to enjoy every bit of it and never stops smiling and laughing. Not until I ask the perennial third-party candidate question, also known as the “spoiler question.” I blurt it out in a brusque form during a moment when the photographer fiddles with the lighting: Why are you helping McCain win?
“I thought you wanted to understand things,” McKinney chides me. “In the 2000 presidential elections, there were one million black people whose votes weren’t counted. They voted their dreams and their aspirations―-their values. And what happened? The Democratic Party, to whom 900,000 of those votes were given, did not fight for the counting of those votes. Al Gore didn’t even put up a fight, and then they want to blame Nader? Anyone who would talk about my candidacy helping McCain denigrates the whole notion of justice in this country.”
I use the next break to steer away from the capricious waters of realpolitik.
Being from Atlanta, what does the heritage of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., mean to you?
If you walk over to the King memorial, on the way, you will see homeless men and women, who are getting more numerous every day in every city across our country. That is exactly what Dr. King was talking about. He said that this country had given the Negro a bounced check. And I state today that the check still can’t be cashed. The United States has the money but it won’t put it in the account on which the check is drawn.
That goes to the core of why I am running. The racial disparities in this country on some indices are worse today than they were at the time of the murder of Dr. King. That’s not progress. As a result of banking practices targeting black and brown people and charging them more to achieve the American dream of home-ownership, we have now experienced the largest transfer of wealth out of black hands since slavery: $92 billion. At the present rate, it would take 581 years to close the wealth gap in this country. I can’t wait 581 years!
Barack Obama has received praise from all sides for ‘not playing the race card.’ What do you say to that?
What I say all the time is that we have unaddressed problems in this country. Hurricane Katrina exposed the real state of black life in this country. Public policy can solve all of that. My engagement in the political process is dealing merely with the facts. I want to see the facts change.
So you still have faith in the election system as a vehicle for change?
I do. The fact that I’ve been treated so harshly by the system for doing nothing more than trying to correct the wrongs I saw, for trying to cash that check―-if I have to pay the kind of price that I’ve paid in order to do that, it means that there’s value in that position. So much value that millions of dollars have been spent to keep me out of the process. So it is clearly worthwhile to participate, even when they steal elections as they’ve done in 2000 and 2004. It exposes to the American people and to the global community that justice has not arrived in the United States.
During the Green Party presidential debate in San Francisco in January, the candidates were asked how their campaigns would help unite the various strains of the progressive movement. While the other four candidates seemed not to know exactly what to do with the question, McKinney brought down standing ovations from the entire assembly with a dramatic appeal for unity within the party.
“What we’re doing is very serious, it’s not a joke!” she said while raising her voice, partly to reproach the audience, partly to plead with them. “This is talking about starting a movement in this country, and we can’t do it if this one doesn’t like that one and this one doesn’t talk to the other one. So, please!―-come together.” The effect was powerful and it was not hard to see how she had been able to put her competition far behind her in the primaries and bring the Green Party into a new phase of its existence.
But can her message reach beyond the perimeter of diehard Greens? Is that five percent of voters even within sight? McKinney has displayed an ability to wage successful campaigns in extremely adverse circumstances before, and with Clemente as her running mate, she might be able to tap into constituencies never before touched by a Green hand. Still, for a third-party candidate to make serious inroads, something more must be achieved: he or she must break through the wall of media indifference, that operates according to the logic that since you won’t win, you mustn’t be heard (and that, of course, makes sure you won’t win).
“Cynthia has so much to teach us, but maybe she could do more if she wasn’t in politics,” says Cherise Beasley, McKinney’s stylist and owner of the While Diamond. McKinney has driven off in the car that has carried her through half of the U.S. states and will take her through the other half by November, and I have just asked Beasley what she thinks about McKinney’s campaign.
So what should McKinney be doing instead of politics? “Maybe she could have her own talk show,” Beasley suggests. “She would be able to reach out and make people aware.” Then she adds: “Or maybe she could still be a politician if she wasn’t attacked all the time and people would write about what she’s trying to say.”
That, indeed, seems to be the rub.
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