------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Aug. 05, 2004 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
RIGHT-WING ELECTORAL OFFENSIVE FAILS IN GA.
By Dianne Mathiowetz Atlanta
The results of the primary election in the state of Georgia are in.
On July 20 Cynthia McKinney won more than 51 percent of the vote in the Democratic Party primary. She had more than twice as many votes as her closest opponent in the field of six candidates. McKinney is the outspoken five-term African-American congressmember who had lost her seat in 2002 after being targeted by pro-war and Zionist forces.
By handily defeating Liane Levitan, the former DeKalb County Democratic chairperson, and Cathy Woolard, who resigned as Atlanta City Council president to run for the 4th Congressional seat, McKinney surprised the political pundits of the Atlanta establishment who had predicted a run- off. Headlines in the major newspaper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, declared she had won a "stealth" victory by conducting a campaign "below the radar."
McKinney's campaign did not spend huge amounts of money on television ads. Instead, an army of volunteers, including some from around the country, galvanized her mass base of support by going door-to-door. She carried precincts she had lost in the last election, swept the predominantly African-American neighborhoods of south DeKalb and received a substantial number of votes in majority white areas.
In the 2002 election, her criticism of the Bush administration concerning information about the 9/11 attacks and the reasons given for war on Iraq were distorted by right-wing talk show hosts. She was lampooned as a "loonie" by other Georgia elected officials, such as Sen. Zell Miller, and was repeatedly called "divisive" and "controversial" in the media. In the 2002 race, won by Denise Majette, thousands of Republican Party members voted in the Democratic primary to ensure her defeat.
Now, with more than 900 U.S. troops dead in Iraq, no weapons of mass destruction found, and evidence of massive cost overruns by Halliburton, McKinney's concerns about what was behind the drive to war are echoed across the country.
Her campaign organized a rally and news conference following a showing of "Fahrenheit 9/11" at a multi-plex theater to underscore McKinney's public stance against the war and occupation.
Patricia Roberts, the mother of Jamaal Addison, the first Georgia soldier to die in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, often accompanied McKinney as she campaigned. Roberts, who has spoken out against the war, always calls for the troops to be brought home now.
McKinney will face a Republican opponent in the November election, but there is little doubt she will win back her seat in Congress.
AFRICAN AMERICAN JUDGE WINS BY LANDSLIDE
In another defeat for right-wing politics, a number of women judges, most of them African American, were re-elected despite an intense effort by backers of the Republican governor, Sonny Perdue. These elections are supposedly "non-partisan," but this year's campaigns were marked with extremely misleading, inflammatory ads and rhetoric.
In particular, Perdue had called for the ouster of Georgia Supreme Court Justice Leah Ward Sears in a speech before the Christian Coalition. Her opponent char ged that she was an "activist" judge who supported gay marriage. The Georgia legislature very narrowly voted to include an amendment to the state constitution prohibiting equal marriage on this November's ballot. Using this issue to attack Sears was seen by some as a way to gauge its effectiveness in rallying right-wing voters.
Sears easily won re-election statewide with over 60 percent of the vote. She is in line to become the first African American woman to be chief judge of the Georgia Supreme Court.
Civil rights groups, women's organizations, trade unions and many other community leaders worked in support of Judge Sears and the other women judges in pushing back the agenda of the religious and political right- wing.
Elections under capitalism do not offer the masses of people a genuine way to change the system, much less get rid of it, but they can provide an indication of the willingness of working and poor people to struggle for real solutions to end poverty, war and all forms of discrimination.
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