I really, really should just consider the whole experience of having been represented by Cynthia McKinney for 12 years to have been a bad dream and, like a bad dream, let it fade away with the departing darkness. However, despite a clear defeat, she won’t go quietly into that gentle night. Not that anyone expected her to do so. Indeed, I’m surprised she waited a whole week to toss around the blame on everything except for herself. I should just go to bed right now, but I can’t stop myself from responding to that article.
Before I lay into her though, I just want to point out an interesting choice of wording which possibly reveals a bit of bias in the piece. When mentioning the turn out for the event, the article describes it as “estimated at fewer than 200 people” (emphasis mine). They could have just as easily said “nearly 200″ which would not have had the same sort of negative connotation, but still conveyed the same information. It could have just been a matter of needing those extra four characters to get the proper length, but that might have been achieved elsewhere in the article just as easily.
Anyway, onto the real point, McKinney once again revealing part of why she lost. She starts off, according to the article (I’ve tried to find a complete transcript, but haven’t), by blaming the electronic voting machines. I distrust them probably as much as she does (though tellingly I don’t remember her speaking out about them two years ago when she won), but I also know that no one in DeKalb who knew how to rig the machines would have cared enough about defeating her to have faked over 12,000 votes (or would have been stupid enough to create such a landslide). Her key criticism of them today though is that they don’t generate a paper trail. Of course she’s been so busy not showing up for the last week of the Congressional session and skipping the primary debates that she missed the fact that every Secretary of State candidate stated that they would be pushing for adding a paper trail to the voting machines.
She then went on the blame our open primary system which allows anyone, regardless of party affiliation to vote in any primary. I will concede that a number of Republicans may have crossed over to vote against her. However, the Ralph Reed/Casey Cagle Lieutenant Governer statewide primary likely drew most of the diehard Republicans to that side of the aisle in July which means that those people could not have voted on the Democrat ballot in the runoff. 8,198 more people voted in the runoff than in the primary (just about unheard of, which means, if nothing else, we can thank her for motivating people to actually get out and vote!) and perhaps they were all Republicans voting against her (though some Republicans who did cross over likely did so to vote for her so they would have one more ineffectual Democrat they could ignore in Washington). The real tale of the tape though is that she lost votes, 301 of them to be exact, between the elections. Well, that and the fact that, again, if the system is such a travesty, why didn’t she ever complain about it any of the times she won.
Of course the real reason she lost was the media. Her are her own words:
“What I have learned from the corporate media is that they are there to protect the status quo. They are there to protect the powers that be, and anyone who becomes a threat in any kind of way by providing information that will go directly to the survival of the community, to the uplifting of the people, will become an enemy.”
Hmm. Remember I mentioned how long she’s been the representative for this district? 12 years. For over a decade she has been in Washington. Yet in all that time she never managed to become one of the “powers that be”, not even a little? She’s basically admitting that she never did the job that she was elected to do, represent our interests on the national stage by working her way into the halls of power. I’m a patient guy. I’d have given her eight years to actually get to work, but after 12 years? No employer would wait even a year for an employee to do their job. No reason we should have had to wait another 12 for her to start hers. Thankfully, now we don’t.