assessment: Taking stock of people and ideas in the news.

Cynthia McKinneyThe rep who cries racism.

By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Friday, April 19, 2002, at 10:45 AM ET

All of us have voices in our heads, whispering insanities. Rep. Cynthia McKinney's problem is that she lets hers speak. She's the Christopher Walken character in Annie Hall, except when she's tempted to swerve into a car's oncoming headlights, she actually does it.

After all, she's not the first liberal to spin the fantasy that President Bush had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks, which McKinney insinuated last month during a radio interview with a Berkeley, Calif., station. The New Yorker's drama critic John Lahr admitted in Slate to a similar notion. And McKinney's colleague, Rep. Melvin Watt, D-N.C., told the Washington Post that "a number of people say it."

But McKinney, a Georgia Democrat, appears to be the first to take it seriously. After confessing his suspicion, Lahr attributed it to "paranoia." Watt hastily followed up his comment by saying, "I can't say that it would be a widely held view." McKinney, weeks after her statement, would say only, "A complete investigation might reveal" that "President Bush or members of his administration have personally profited from the attacks of 9-11."

It's not the first time McKinney's mouth has gotten her in trouble. In her 10 years in Congress, hardly a year has gone by when she didn't make news for an outlandish accusation or a wild conspiracy theory (ideally, as in this case, a combination of both). During a nasty 1996 congressional campaign with racial tension on both sides, she called supporters of her Republican opponent "holdovers from the Civil War days" and "a ragtag group of neo-Confederates." Never mind that her opponent was Jewish. And during the 2000 presidential campaign, she wrote that "Gore's Negro tolerance level has never been too high. I've never known him to have more than one black person around him at any given time." Never mind that Gore's campaign manager was black. (McKinney is not a particularly partisan finger-pointer—there are enough delusions for both sides.)

Around every corner, McKinney sees a secret cabal plotting her demise. After the majority-black district that first elected her to Congress was struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutionally gerrymandered, she lashed out at the court as racist. She compared the verdict to Dred Scott, the decision that declared slaves were nothing more than chattel, and Plessy v. Ferguson, which legitimized separate-but-equal American apartheid. (Never mind that she was re-elected in a white majority district two years later.) During her next election, she declared that Georgia's kaolin industry engineered the case that eliminated her district, as payback for her fights against the industry in Congress. (Kaolin is a white clay that is used in a number of products, including porcelain.) And last fall, she tried to solicit money for black Americans from a Saudi prince who said U.S. policy in the Middle East was partly to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks, then she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, "Why such a negative reaction to my letter? I believe that when it comes to major foreign policy issues, many prefer to have black people seen and not heard." (To which the National Review's Jonah Goldberg retorted that "she needs to explain why I keep finding these quotes in my morning paper by Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell.")

But being the Girl Who Cried Racism means that people will also roll their eyes at the legitimate slights that the first black Congresswoman from Georgia has faced. In August 1993, during her first term in office, a Capitol Hill police officer tried to prevent her from bypassing a metal detector, as members of Congress are allowed to do. For years afterward, The Hill reports, the Capitol Police pinned a picture of McKinney to an office wall, warning officers to learn her face because she refuses to wear her member's pin. (And because officers are innately suspicious of a black woman with braided hair and gold shoes.) Five years later, she blasted White House security after guards thought her 23-year-old white aide was the congresswoman.

Incidents like these ground her wilder scenarios in a reality with which many of her constituents are familiar. As McKinney put it in a 1996 interview with the Progressive, "African Americans have always known that a little bit of paranoia was healthy for us." Like most conspiracy-mongers, McKinney taps that paranoia to weave facts into a web of fiction.

She knows that a portion of her constituency is receptive to the allegations she makes, and she deliberately plays on their fears. Her comments aren't flippant ad-libs. The Oliver Stone-style plot she relayed to Berkeley's radio listeners was part of a prepared statement, "Thoughts on Our War Against Terrorism," that McKinney later published in the left-wing newsletter Counterpunch. (Click here to hear her read it on the March 25 edition of KPFA's Flashpoints. Her statement begins at the 30-minute mark.) What many people see as outrageous demagoguery, others see as courageous truth-telling.

And by disseminating her more fanciful messages in obscure media outlets, McKinney insulates herself somewhat from the chunk of her constituents who would be outraged by her antics. She backs down slightly when the mainstream media come calling. After her comments about Gore's "Negro tolerance level" were posted on her House Web site, she disclaimed them and canceled four scheduled interviews with the Associated Press to discuss the incident. She employed a similar strategy in '96 when her father repeatedly called her opponent a "racist Jew." (When asked about his comments by the New York Times, he replied, "He is a racist Jew, that's what he is, isn't he?") After ignoring his comments for a week, she distanced herself from them and "fired" him from her campaign, though he had no formal role.

Despite her controversial reputation, McKinney hasn't had a close race in her five congressional elections, winning with at least 58 percent of the vote each time. This year she faces a primary opponent, Denise Majette, who says she will exploit her 9/11 comments. But if history is any guide, Majette will discover that voters don't elect McKinney in spite of her mouth. They elect her because of it.

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Chris Suellentrop, a former Slate staffer, writes "The Opinionator" for the New York Times.

Illustration by Charlie Powell.

If you liked this Assessment column, check out Backstabbers, Crazed Geniuses, and Animals We Hate, a collection of our all-time funniest, meanest, sweetest, and weirdest profiles.

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Notes From The Fray Editor:

Supporters of McKinney (and there are many of them in The Fray) think her theories and claims have not been disproved in any way; her detractors think her views are self-evidently so wrong that no rebuttal is needed. This is a less common Fray situation than you might think, and results in total mutual incomprehension.

Harry summed up one point of view: "Although I find McKinney's opinions abhorrent, I find it refreshing that in this country, people have the right to express their beliefs." Others thought McKinney's views were just plain right—Ethel Steinmetz said: "I appreciate the bravery of Rep. McKinney. You must be very afraid of what she has to say to label her 'crazy.'" Jeanne Doyle went so far as to say "I consider Chris Suellentrop far more dangerous than Rep. McKinney." Riccaric's post (below) is well worth reading in full on conspiracy theories. And anyone looking for examples of such theories will find plenty of them in The Fray.

Reader Comments From The Fray:

Very interesting piece, but the opening doesn't reconcile with the rest of it. Suellentrop says that McKinney has a "problem" in that she gives free rein to the little voices in her head. But then Suellentrop goes on to explain that this has helped, not hurt, her political career. In what sense is it a problem? Is it that people ignore the "legitimate slights" she has faced? That seems awfully minor compared to winning five House elections.

As Eeyore might say, I think the problem is that it is not a problem. I have no illusions about the civility of politics in years past. And the GOP has had its share of ridiculously paranoid politicians (Bob Dornan ring any bells?). But Dornan was a national laughingstock nearly from the get-go. The line that McKinney, a black Democrat, needs to cross to achieve that status is miles and miles away.

--Ananda Gupta

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

Conspiracy theories are a good way for those who are not connected to political power to understand how politics works. Most Americans feel powerless in relation to the government and the corporate sector, do not vote in most elections, and do not pay close attention to the mainstream media…Their theories often constitute "good guesses" concerning dimensions of political life that the mainstream media refuses to address.

--Riccaric

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

Put the blame regarding Cynthia McKinney's track record right where it belongs: the idiot voters of her district. Sorry, but after the first term, the blame shifts squarely to the voters, as well as to the miscreant Congresswoman herself. Won't wear the members' pin? Excuse me, Rep. McKinney, but where were you on 11 Spetember 2001? (Judging by some of your comments, you bigot, clearly you were vacationing on Mars.)
Given the near-ridiculous level of security after the Atrocity, the effrontery of Ms. McKinney deserves one punishment: expulsion from Congress.

--Rich Mahady

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

McKinney's comments are just another in a long line of paranoid observations in recent years. And I don't mean just hers. The paranoia of the fringes of both the right and left, and a general willingness to make outrageous accusations, has been with us for a long while. Whether we go back to the benchmark of paranoia in politics, Joe McCarthy and Nixon's Committee of UnAmerican Activities, conjecture of conservative congressmen about the death of Vince Foster, or the paranoia of leftists about the "Industrial defence complex," American politics and paranoid conspiracy theories go hand in hand.

Mrs. McKinney's long history of such observations, along with her record of high voter approval indicates that such paranoia resonates with a larger than we would like to admit demographic. Whatever your thoughts on the veracity of her insinuations, there is no getting around the fact that they polarize and energize us.

--Doubter

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

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