Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Thursday, July 18, 2002

McKinney, D-Ga., has so embarrassed many of her constituents that some Democrats have pushed the panic button and put up credible opposition to the five-term lawmaker in the primary Aug. 20. Denise Majette, a state court judge for nine years, stepped down from the bench to announce her candidacy.

But some outraged constituents view this as an attempt to paper over the misrepresentation the Democrat party has offered the voters of the state’s Fourth District.

Van Auken, on the other hand, in an exclusive interview with NewsMax.com, defined herself as "the polar opposite of McKinney on all issues.”

McKinney’s career has been helped along by her father, a veteran civil rights activist with whom she served in the Georgia House as the country’s only father-daughter legislative team.

Van Auken – mother, grandmother and small business owner – offers a commonsense agenda and is devoid of "insider” connections, but heavy on real-world experience. If McKinney survives Majette’s long-shot primary challenge, Van Auken anticipates giving the voters a clear choice between two visions of America.

It is hard to imagine a politician who has given her political opposition more ammunition than what "The Almanac of American Politics" describes as "the confrontation-prone” McKinney. Not for nothing do constituents, including McKinney’s fellow black voters in the district, gleefully hug Van Auken when she introduces herself as a candidate who wants the congresswoman’s job.

Getting bad publicity is easy. Getting good publicity is more difficult. Based on the record, one wonders if the Georgia Democrat fully understands the difference.

In a time of war against terrorism, McKinney has taken unsubstantiated pot shots at the commander in chief and found moral equivalence between the U.S. and those who would destroy us.

"What did this administration know and when did it know it about the events of September 11th?” she rhetorically asked during a March 25th radio interview. "Who else knew, and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered … What do they have to hide?”

Even a Democrat U.S. Senator Calls McKinney 'Loony'

A prominent fellow Democrat, Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, responded by calling McKinney "loony" and "dangerous and irresponsible."

McKinney's rant caused many of her constituents to recoil. But even worse, they were embarrassed by her groveling to an Arab monarch who said in effect that the terror attacks on America were partly America’s own fault.

As Van Auken points out, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Tatal offered Mayor Rudy Giuliani a check for $10 million after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center if the New York City mayor would say that U.S. foreign policy played a key role in driving the terrorists to their cowardly acts.

Giuliani told the prince, in so many words, what he could do with his money.

"There is no moral equivalent for this attack,” Giuliani said. "The people who did it lost any right to ask for justification when they slaughtered” thousands of innocent Americans. "Not only are those statements wrong, they’re part of the problem.”

Most Americans said amen to that resolve. Not Cynthia McKinney.

The congresswoman, Van Auken says, "apologized for Mayor Giuliani’s courageous stand, and wrote the Saudi prince a shameless letter begging for his money!” As far as Van Auken knows, the prince did not respond with the requested cash.

But some others with questionable positions on America’s role in the fight against terrorism have responded, the Republican aspirant notes.

"McKinney has received thousands of dollars from groups and individuals investigated for supporting America-hating Islamic terrorists,” she charges.

In her interview with NewsMax.com, Van Auken made it clear she is not basing her opposition solely on popular revulsion to McKinney’s statements regarding the war on terror. The Republican, new to the campaign trail, is upfront and lucid stating exactly where she stands on other issues as well.

'Night and Day'

She favors the flat tax, for example. She acknowledges that McKinney uncharacteristically voted for the Bush tax cut. But she attributes that to the congresswoman’s getting "special permission” from the House Democrat leadership to stray off her party’s reservation this time because of voter sentiment back home. The difference between her views and those of the incumbent are "rather like night and day,” she told us.

"I am pro-America, pro-intelligence, pro-military, pro-capitalism,” she told us, "I will vote to do most anything that will improve the education of our children. I back our constitutional government.”

Unlike McKinney who "creates hysterical division” among the people and "is always trying to make things race-oriented,” Van Auken understands that many of the 54 percent of the district that are black are "very upper-middle-class professional families.” And "the majority of them believe the Civil War is over, and believe that how they achieve and advance depends on what they themselves have to offer rather than to more or less extort money from the rest of society.”

The Civil War comment is a reference to McKinney’s support for reparations payments for slavery, even though no slave or slave owner is alive today. The conservative candidate says most African-Americans in her district are concerned with the here and now, and have the same ambitions and aspirations as most other Americans. The divisiveness is a turnoff to many of them.

"People are tired of that,” she told NewsMax.

McKinney’s divisiveness, alleges the would-be GOP opponent, manifests itself in that much of the Jewish population in Fulton County, in and around Atlanta, rejects the congresswoman’s pro-Palestinian stance.

Pro-choice on Gun Rights

Van Auken says that, unlike McKinney, she will not "raise your taxes,” "grow big government,” or "shrink your freedoms.” The latter is prompted by the GOP candidate’s dispute with McKinney’s desire "to take guns away from anyone except those that are in government control.”

A request for comment for this article from the McKinney campaign elicited no response by the time this story was filed Wednesday night.

This is "one country, with one language, under God” where each American takes "personal responsibility” for his actions, according to Van Auken, a Georgian for 31 years and a native of New Mexcico.

She herself has three primary opponents who have raised only a fraction of the money she has accrued in her campaign war chest. And that amount in turn is tiny compared to what McKinney has raised, according to the latest numbers publicized on the Internet.

The same report shows Majette has raised a little more than half of what the incumbent has garnered for the Aug. 20 Democrat primary. If Majette pulls an upset and McKinney is rejected at the polls by her own fellow Democrats, that could inject ambivalence into what otherwise would be one of the clearest choices in the fall campaign of any congressional race in the country.

An uphill battle? Certainly. But Cynthia Van Auken, whose only similarity to the incumbent are that they are both women and share the same first name, is a fighter. She does not leave the impression of being one who shrinks from a seemingly impossible challenge.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

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War on Terrorism

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