Cynthia McKinney’s back on the trail

Cynthia McKinney is back on the campaign trail and still “talking truth to power.”

The firebrand congresswoman, twice sent packing by voters, has shed her Democrat brand and her metro Atlanta home and now carries the Green Party banner as its presidential nominee.

But while her past candidacies once drew either unbridled support or raw antipathy, this one does something truly shocking —- it draws shrugs.

Josie Dean, a DeKalb County activist who long supported McKinney, said her voice is still needed.

“But she’s no longer a threat,” said Dean. “There’s so much going on, no one hears that she’s running. She ran at the wrong time.”

Every two years from 1992 until her last defeat in 2006, McKinney was on the trail, running for Congress, lighting up rooms of devoted followers with fiery, old-school civil rights-style oratory.

McKinney, 53, now lives in California and is conducting a shadow campaign. She engages in virtual debates on the Web and attends sporadic rallies. Life as a third-party presidential candidate in America is akin to sitting at the children’s table at Thanksgiving: Fringe candidates are not invited to the main debates and must settle for facing off against each other.

One online “debate” had McKinney and independent candidate Ralph Nader answering questions from a taped Bob Schieffer, the moderator of the major candidates’ third debate. Another found McKinney on breakthematrix.org “debating” herself. Other third-party candidates —- such as Libertarian Bob Barr, Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin and Nader —- did not show, leaving McKinney answering questions from three blurry and jerky talking heads on the computer screen.

Her presentation over two hours sounded confident, reasoned, humorous, passionate and conspiratorial. “Our position is we should leave the oil in the soil and go with solar, geothermal, wind and hydroelectric,” she said.

She likes some of the economic ideas of former Republican candidate Ron Paul, who supports abolishing the Federal Reserve and going back to the gold standard. And she wants to ban derivative trading.

She pointed out she was against the Iraq war since the start and said peace is the Green Party’s most important plank.

McKinney drew scorn in 2002 for suggesting President Bush knew about the Sept. 11 attacks in advance. In 2006, she allegedly struck a Capitol Hill police officer after he did not recognize her as a congresswoman. Both incidents likely contributed to primary election losses those years.

She is still unafraid to lob verbal bombs.

During a news conference last month, McKinney said a woman told her that after Hurricane Katrina the Department of Defense processed “5,000 bodies that had received a single bullet wound to the head. … The data was entered into a Pentagon computer. Reportedly, the bodies were dumped into a swamp.”

McKinney said she got “verification” from anonymous Red Cross workers and suspects the dead were prisoners.

McKinney did not respond to several requests for comment for this story. In the debate, she called the story of the bodies “a credible report. We were on the verge of investigating (in Congress). Unfortunately, I had to leave office before we could investigate.”

Green Party veterans such as Charles Douglas, a former state committeeman for the party in California, have problems with McKinney atop the ticket. “She got bounced twice by her own party (in primary elections in 2002 and 2006) and moving to the Green Party is a path to political attention, as opposed to being a political hasbeen,” he said.

Douglas supports Nader, now an independent, who got nearly 3 million votes in 2000. But David Cobb, the 2004 Green Party candidate, got only about 119,000 votes. Douglas thinks McKinney will draw Cobb-like support.

McKinney is on the ballot in 32 states, but not in Georgia. Apparently, most campaign donors from her native state have moved on; of the 183 people who gave more than $200 to her campaign, just three are from Georgia. (She’s raised just $177,000 overall.)

Nan Garrett, a longtime Green Party member from Georgia and national women’s co-chairwoman, said McKinney brings energy and experience.

“She’s the first presidential candidate we’ve had who’s had public office experience,” she said. “She’s known as forthright when others want to skim around the issues. We like candidates to tell us the truth, even if you don’t want to hear it.”

Brent McMillan, the party’s political director, said he “cringed” when he heard McKinney’s theory concerning mass executions and a Louisiana swamp.

“But she’s very articulate at other times,” McMillan said.