Still Crazy After All These Years

By John K. Wilson, AlterNet. Posted August 16, 2004.

The new Illinois candidate for the U.S. Senate, conservative Republican Alan Keyes, may be most famous for a liberal act: jumping into a mosh pit while Rage Against the Machine performed, body-surfing the crowd, and exchanging body slams with a spiky-haired teen as a means of getting filmmaker Michael Moore's endorsement for president in 2000. As Moore put it, "We knew Alan Keyes was insane. We just didn't know how insane until that moment."

"Insane" is an adjective that may be tossed around a lot regarding Keyes because he has been saying a lot of kooky things for a long time. Mostly, his extremist ideas have been overlooked. In the 1996 and 2000 Republican presidential contests, no candidate saw Keyes as a threat or wanted to risk criticizing one of the few prominent African-American Republicans around.

Last week, Keyes accepted the Republican nomination to run against the Democratic nominee Barack Obama — and immediately railed against Obama’s support of abortion rights. Abortion is Keyes' number-one issue: He wants a total ban, with an exception only as a "collateral and unintended consequence" of saving a woman's life (not the health of a woman, rape, or incest). In 2002, he said, "This issue alone, which I believe dominates our moral decline as a people, should decide this and every election cycle.”

In a May 7 speech in Provo, Utah, Keyes said the 9/11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,200 people, were a message from God to oppose abortion: "I think that's a way of Providence telling us, 'I love you all; I'd like to give you a chance. Wake up! Would you please wake up?'" During a campaign appearance in Bedford, N.H., in 2000, Keyes asked a class of fifth-graders, "If I were to lose my mind right now and pick one of you up and dash your head against the floor and kill you, would that be right?" He then went on to tell the children that some courts and politicians think it's OK to murder 6-month-old children.

Keyes has an apocalyptic view of America's future unless it repents: "I do stay up at night thinking about what's going to happen to America. I do stay up at night with a vision of our people in conflict, of our cities in flames, of our economy in ruins."

A history of failures

Born in 1950, with a career-military father, Keyes was elected president of Boys Nation in high school, met President Lyndon Johnson, and spoke to the American Legion in Dallas. He avoided the draft in the late 1960s thanks to student deferments and a high draft number. Keyes attended Cornell University, where his favorite teacher was legendary conservative Allan Bloom. Keyes spent a year studying in Paris with Bloom, then followed him to Harvard, where Keyes earned his doctorate in government. A fan of J.R.R. Tolkien and a Trekkie, he plays classical guitar and even considered a career as an opera singer. Lately, his version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” sung for a local TV camera, has been making the rounds on the Internet.

In 1978, as part of the State Department Foreign Service policy-planning staff headed by Paul Wolfowitz, who is now a key foreign-policy and defense adviser to Bush, Keyes was the black face used by the Reagan administration to oppose economic sanctions against the apartheid government of South Africa. Keyes also worked as a low-level diplomat at the U.S. Consulate General in Bombay, India, where he met Jeane Kirkpatrick. When she became the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Reagan, she hired Keyes in 1983. Keyes spent two years as U.S. representative to the United Nations Economic and Social Council (UNESCO).

In 1988, when Kirkpatrick was approached to run for the U.S. Senate in Maryland, she demurred, suggesting Keyes instead, and a conservative star was born, albeit a losing conservative star.

Keyes lost to Democratic U.S. Sen. Paul Sarbanes with a respectable 38 percent of the vote. By 1992, when Maryland voters got to know him better, his support dropped to a mere 29 percent against a bonafide liberal, Barbara Mikulski. During that campaign, Keyes paid himself an annual salary of $100,000 from campaign funds, then refused to pay off his campaign's $45,000 debt. He later paid off his Senate-campaign debts, but, according to Federal Election Commission records, he owes nearly $525,000 from his failed presidential bids.

Obama's campaign juggernaut scared away many other candidates, but Keyes isn't afraid to lose — his previous losses have always paid off in other ways.

Keyes' failed 1988 Senate campaign led to a job running Citizens Against Government Waste (1989-91) until his failed 1992 campaign, which led to a radio talk show, The Alan Keyes Show. His failed 1996 campaign for president helped him double his speaking fee from $7,500 to $15,000 per speech. And Keyes cashed in on his failed 2000 primary performance with a cable-TV show in 2002 on MSNBC called Alan Keyes Is Making Sense. If only that were true. Viewers disagreed, and anemic ratings caused MSNBC to cancel the primetime show. For Keyes, losing elections has been a good career move in promoting himself.

John K. Wilson lives in Normal, IL. and is founder of the Indy and collegefreedom.org. A version of this story was published last week in the Illinois Times.

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