Georgia voters gave controversial Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney a big slap in the face by nixing her re-election bid in a closely watched runoff:
Cynthia McKinney, the fiery Georgia congresswoman known for her conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11 attacks and the scuffle she had earlier this year with a U.S. Capitol police officer, lost a runoff election Tuesday for her district’s Democratic nomination.
Attorney Hank Johnson, a former county commissioner, won the nomination with 59 percent of the vote, surpassing McKinney by more than 11,000 votes.
That’s a decisive defeat.
McKinney, her state’s first black congresswoman, has long been controversial. Her suggestion that the Bush administration had advance knowledge of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks helped galvanize opposition and she lost her seat in 2002, but won it again two years ago.
In her latest brouhaha in March, she struck a Capitol police officer who did not recognize her and tried to stop her from entering a House office building.
The lesson here is that there are limits in politics. McKinney’s comments about the 911 attacks raised the eyebrows — and ire — of many in both political parties, across the country. The incident with the Capitol police officer also became a huge controversy as it was fanned by conservative talk show hosts…but she didn’t help her case when her defenders suggested she was singled out by the officer for racial reasons.
Even in America, a country where entertainment and politics often considers outrageousness a virtue, there are boundaries. McKinney crossed them and then came under fire the the waning hours of the campaign for saying her opponent’s campaign money was from outside the state when it turned out a good chunk of her campaign money came from outside the state.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.