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Wed. Apr 17, 2002

McKinney's Contributions

Follow The Money? – I’d skimmed through this list of campaign contributions to Rep. Cynthia McKinney in 2000, planning to come back for a more detailed look at her funding profile. After all, when accusations of near treason are made based on a politician’s relationships and their profit motivations, it’s only fair to look at the accuser’s relationships as well, to see if there’s any insight on their motivations.

Somebody beat me to it, and while I can’t vouch for their exact statistics, it does confirm the impression I got from my scan: "...the Southeastern Legal Foundation today released a summary report of McKinney’s 1999-2000 campaign contributions, revealing that 21 percent of her financial contributions of $101 or more came from Arab or Middle Eastern-connected individuals and organizations, including the American-Muslim Council and the Council on American/Islamic Relations, both of which maintain ties or have expressed support for terrorist organizations."

We don’t collect religious information in the US census, and thus no one can really even say for sure how many Muslims there are in the US, nevermind in one Congressional District. But District 4 is mostly comprised of Dekalb County, and in 1990, of 599,830 ancestries reported, 1,784 (0.3%) were Arab, with only 36,492 (6%) saying they were ”foreign born.” It’s not a one to one statistical correlation, but it’s enough to make clear that District 4 is nowhere near one fifth Muslim, and therefore one has to note such a large weighting of contributions from such sources.

Looking at the individuals who contributed, there’s plenty of ”citizens,” both known (Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, Maya Angelou, Jane Fonda, Coretta Scott King) and unknown, people simply exercising their political rights. But there’s a stopper or two. While it’s hard to draw any conclusion from the two contributions by former Dekalb County Sheriff and accused murderer Sidney Dorsey (who was not under indictment at the time of the contribution), it certainly jumps out to this citizen. You see, "I live in a county where you can kill the sheriff, and see no one punished for it." It bugs me bad, and when I see the name of the sheriff’s alleged murderer on a contribution list … twice … I am once again reminded of it.

But the SLF found more than that: "On April 17, 2000, McKinney received a $1,000 contribution from Abdurahman Alamoudi, the founder and former executive director of the American-Muslim Council (AMC)—a separate contribution from the $1,000 contributed by the AMC that day [...] Abdurahman Alamoudi, founder and former executive director with the AMC, attended an anti-Israel protest outside the White House on Oct. 28, 2000. ’Alamoudi revved up the crowd, saying: ’I have been labeled by the media in New York as being a supporter of Hamas [...] We are all supporters of Hamas . . . I wish they added that I am also a supporter of Hezbollah.’ "

All of these various tidbits add up to one question for me: who is her constituency? It’s early, but so far 64% of her contributions for the 2002 campaign have come from out of state. Like all of the above, that’s not illegal at all. But all these little facts add detail to the overall impression, making it clearer.

Much of what she says, the manner in which she expends her political capital, and a significant portion of her funding, appears to have little to with the people who actually live in Georgia District 4.