IMPORTANT: Let me know if you have room on the page for a pic of Cynthia Mckinney – CBB

McKinney Poised To Return To Congress With Unusual Campaign StyleBy Kristen WyattAssociated Press Writer DECATUR, Ga. (AP) – Imagine running for Congress without even running a radio ad, let alone one on television. Without talking to reporters in your area. Without raising much money. Now imagine being heavily favored to win. That’s the campaign of Cynthia McKinney, who was elected as Georgia’s first black congresswoman in 1992 and spent five terms in the U.S. House before being defeated by a fellow Democrat two years ago. McKinney is back, and poised to make a triumphant return to Congress with a poorly funded campaign and scant mention in the local news media. Surprising? Not when considering her Republican challenger is little known in the heavily black and Democrat suburban neighborhoods that make up the congressional district, where many believe McKinney has been unfairly blasted by the press. “There is a great mistrust of the media in her district,” said William Boone, a political scientist at Clark Atlanta University. “The media has misrepresented and ignored their communities unless someone’s getting busted for drugs. So Cynthia McKinney’s relationship with the press has always been adversarial, but so has the district’s.” McKinney made national headlines in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as she criticized President Bush’s handling of the crisis. Stories about her got particularly snarky when she denounced New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani for refusing a donation from a Saudi Arabian prince and she told a radio talk show host that Bush’s pro-war stance may be related to his friends in the defense industry who would profit from a war. McKinney’s comments were repeated in the news media, and she went on to lose a bitter primary battle in 2002 to Denise Majette, another black woman who was little-known before running for Congress. With Majette vacating the seat to run for the Senate, McKinney won the six-candidate primary in July, getting the majority of the vote needed to avoid a runoff. McKinney’s supporters believe the media is partly to blame for her defeat two years ago. “She’s been unfairly portrayed,” said Janice Lowe of Decatur. “They were saying she was talking too much about issues she wasn’t knowledgeable about. But she was very much knowledgeable, and the media didn’t want to talk about that.” McKinney herself appears to discount the media. Her schedule is not made public, and she typically shuns interview requests. McKinney’s Web site even sends visitors to an Internet column about McKinney and the press called “The Screwing of Cynthia McKinney.” Instead of following the campaign style of most modern congressional candidates — lots of TV spots, lots of aides whose job it is to prod reporters to write about the candidate — McKinney takes an old-fashioned approach. She tours churches and neighborhoods where she is most popular. She focuses on boosting turnout among people who already like her, not gaining new recognition from voters who might not know her. It’s a friends-and-neighbors style that can work in a district as compact as Georgia’s 4th, which is almost entirely made up of Atlanta’s suburban DeKalb County. According to Rita Kirk, a journalism professor at Southern Methodist University who has worked as a media strategist for political campaigns, the smaller a district is, the easier it is to campaign without relying on media to get a message out. “Her message is conveyed in person,” Kirk said. “She has a huge network, sort of like the old Baptist phone tree, where everyone calls someone else who calls someone else to get a message out. People feel like they’re only a few steps away from her. The result for her is that if she talked to the press, her message would only get muddied.” Even McKinney’s opponent, Republican Catherine Davis, conceded that McKinney is a powerful campaigner considering she’s nearly invisible in local news. “She has name recognition, and her voters are loyal to her. She’s not even trying to appeal to the broader community,” said Davis, a telecommunications executive who has run for office before but never won. A McKinney volunteer and contributor, Eric Hovdesven of Atlanta, said the former congresswoman is smart to ignore local press. “The more the Atlanta press doesn’t cover her, the more people want to support her,” Hovdesven said. “People felt she was wrongly accused of things last time and was almost taken from them.” The low-key campaigning is cheap, a good thing for a candidate who raised only about $250,000 by a June 30 reporting deadline. In contrast, a candidate who won a nearby open congressional primary, Republican Lynn Westmoreland, had raised more than $1.3 million by that time and spent generously on television ads. McKinney’s fund-raising rolls are modest but include some influential names, such as Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., who gave $350. McKinney has also attracted donations from Arab-Americans outside Georgia who like McKinney’s outspoken support for Palestinians. Helping McKinney is the even limper fund-raising by Davis, who says she has taken in just about $20,000. The way most voters and political watchers see it, there’s no way McKinney can lose. “She already has a good strong track record,” said Lowe, the Decatur voter. “She’ll win again on that basis alone. She doesn’t need to be going out and buying ads to tell people that.”