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After running for US Senate three times with disastrous results (drawing 38%, 29%, and 27%, respectively, as the Republican nominee in two different states) and after two marginal and embarrassing Presidential campaigns, Alan Keyes has decided to make yet another race for the nation’s highest office. He announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination on Janet Parshall’s radio show last Friday; six days later, he spent an hour talking about it on the radio with me.
For the most part, I let the man speak (filibuster, really) with only occasional interruptions to try to get answers to direct questions. The normal give-and-take of the interview format doesn’t suit the Keyes style of free-flowing eloquence and eruptive, volcanic passion. The orator’s crisp diction, elegant verbosity and forceful declamations often serve to mask illogical leaps and slippery connections that might seem laughable from a less polished presenter.
At the end of our mostly frustrating hour, the candidate finally provided one concise, focused response to an inquiry posed by a sympathetic caller: she wanted to know who Keyes might select as his running mate after he claimed the GOP nomination.
To my amazement, Dr. Keyes admitted that he’d given the question “a great deal of thought” (an astonishing declaration for a fringe candidate who’s been in the race less than a week) and mentioned that he would seriously consider choosing either Sam Brownback or Mike Huckabee to join the ticket with him. He expressed warm respect for both the Kansas Senator and the former Arkansas Governor.
The contradiction couldn’t have been more glaring or more obvious: just minutes before, Dr. Keyes had explained his candidacy as a moral necessity because of the lack of worthy candidates in the Republican field. He had claimed that his decision to make a belated entry into the race arose from the utter incapacity of the announced candidates to raise the moral issues which need to be emphasized.
Those announced candidates include, of course, both Brownback and Huckabee.
If they’re worthy of installing in the Vice Presidency, just the proverbial heart-beat away from ultimate power, then why aren’t they worthy of support as Presidential candidates? How can Dr. Keyes on the one hand praise his two rivals for their moral clarity and decency then on the other hand condemn the entire Republican field as so lacking in morality and decency that he needed to join the fray yet again?
Among the many misfires in Alan Keyes’ checkered career, one of the more curious involved a short-lived TV program on MSNBC called, oddly enough, “Alan Keyes is Making Sense.”
No one could have appended that title to our on-air interchange this afternoon. The better title might have been: “Alan in Wonderland.”
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