One basic rule for political office seekers is to avoid talking down to audiences they are trying to woo. But there’s nothing orthodox about the candidacy of Republican Alan Keyes, who is running for U.S. Senate with fervor and certitude, convinced of his ability to divine truths that many in power do not see. Take, for example, Keyes’ appearance at a recent luncheon of the Metropolitan Planning Council, a group of prominent business leaders.
They wanted to hear Keyes’ views on economic development, housing and schools. But Keyes got up before the packed banquet hall at the Chicago Hilton and Towers and told the group their questions showed they were completely out of touch with the root cause of most urban problems: “the collapse of the family structure in key communities.” Some of those in the audience shifted in their seats and looked across the tables at each other quizzically, as if to say, “Who is this guy?” Others got up and left. As for Keyes, he walked out of the hotel pleased at making the audience uncomfortable.
A man with true oratorical powers, Keyes often takes potentially hostile audiences to task, a tactic that infuriates some but also convinces a small but fervent group of followers that he is the only politician willing to tell voters the brutal truth. It’s in part because of his verbal gifts that Illinois Republicans decided to recruit Keyes from Maryland to run against Democrat Barack Obama, despite two previous failed runs for the Senate and two failed presidential bids. The question remains: Did they get what they bargained for? Even some of Keyes’ allies squirm at his frequent dismissal of concerns that many politicians believe are central to winning, such as promising new government programs and tailoring his message to particular audiences. But from Aug. 8, the day he entered the U.S. Senate race, Keyes has made clear he views his campaign as a crusade for the soul of America. In his announcement speech, Keyes said Obama’s support of civil unions for homosexual couples and opposition to measures restricting abortion threaten the very basis of American rights. In the first few days of the campaign, Keyes made waves by saying on WBEZ-FM and in other interviews that Obama’s stance on abortion is the “slaveholder’s view of human liberty,” because it holds choice, not life, as the highest good. Keyes’ main strategy as he travels around Illinois is not only to attract voters, but also to enroll followers to his cause, people who believe, as he does, that America must address issues of morality before anything else. He paints Obama as a radical leftist, scolding the state senator for abandoning “the principles that Lincoln fought for as the foundation of America’s conscience.”
“Christ would not vote for Barack Obama because Barack Obama has voted to behave in a way that it is inconceivable for Christ to have behaved,” Keyes has said.
Preaches, lectures, scolds
On the campaign trail, Keyes preaches to audiences that are friendly, lectures ones he thinks he can win over and scolds those he thinks might be hostile — notably press gatherings.
Keyes believes his own intellectual and religious journey from disillusionment to rock-solid faith gives him license to prescribe cures for the world’s ills.
“I was raised as a Catholic, with a strong sense that God is in charge, and then you encounter these evils, whether directly or through your learning about the history of black people in America, and it can be pretty shocking,” Keyes said in an interview. “It can be an experience that shakes you to the core, and leaves you wrestling with issues.
“It shakes your sense of two things. First, the goodness of the country. But it also can be a kind of a shock to your sense of the goodness of the universe, the notion that God is sovereign.”
Keyes has made expounding on his traditionalist viewpoints his life’s work, and it’s his ability to articulate those views that brought him to Illinois.
The state Republican Party is in disarray and splintered among moderates and conservatives. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald’s seat is up for grabs, as the maverick Republican decided not to seek re-election. After a contentious GOP primary, the winner, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race following embarrassing revelations from formerly sealed divorce files.
Rather than leave Obama unopposed on Election Day, Republicans asked Keyes to relocate from Maryland and finish the Illinois race because of his name recognition and skills as a fervent spokesman for the conservative cause. Few believe he can defeat Obama.
Popular with a few
But Keyes’ unbending views, especially his opposition to abortion and gay rights, have gained him a unique celebrity among a hard core of supporters nationwide. His eloquence often leaves audiences impressed, though polls and his poor political track record indicate it’s hard to translate Keyes’ verbal gifts into political victory.
Part of the problem may be his implacability. Critics have labeled Keyes’ campaign rhetoric as unhinged, hectoring, angry, hysterical and mean-spirited.
“The crucial issue for him is abortion, and everything turns on it,” said Paul Rahe, a longtime friend Keyes met at Cornell University. “He sees abortion in precisely the same way [President Abraham] Lincoln saw slavery — that embracing it as just and right means rejecting the dignity of man as man.”
On the campaign trail, Keyes’ recurrent theme of religious faith often makes him sound like an evangelical preacher.
“I am appealing to people of faith to vote their faith,” Keyes has said. “I am appealing to people of conscience to vote their conscience. And I think if they do, this election is a shoo-in.”
Keyes is the youngest of five children, Army “brats” whose parents instilled in them strict religious views and personal discipline.
“It was probably good for me, though; don’t let me give the impression it wasn’t,” Keyes said of his Army sergeant father’s methods of child rearing. “There’s a time you get out of bed, that you make up the bed. You tighten everything up so a quarter could be bounced off it. . . . I felt I was being raised in boot camp.”
Like many military families, the Keyeses bounced around from state to state, even living in Verona, Italy, for three years. When Alan Keyes was a teenager, they settled in San Antonio, where, as a junior at Cole High School, he won the American Legion National Oratorical Contest. His speech was called “The Blessings of Liberty: The Blessings of Life.”
The topic of his award-winning speech hints at the issues Keyes was beginning to struggle with — racism and discrimination in America, as well as the history of slavery. Keyes felt the brunt of discrimination himself, he says, when he ran for governor of the American Legion Boys State in Texas and other students refused to vote for him because he was black.
American ideals
He dedicated himself to studying the genesis of American ideals and vowed to fight for them, using his increasingly persuasive speaking abilities.
After graduating from high school in 1968, Keyes enrolled at Cornell University. During his freshman year, a group of black students — toting shotguns and with ammunition strapped across their chests — took over a university building to protest how they were treated by the school’s administration.
Keyes opposed the protest and received death threats. He left campus, following a group of conservative students and professors to Harvard University. Among those who helped Keyes transfer to Harvard was his mentor at Cornell, Allan Bloom. Bloom, whom Keyes calls his most important teacher, was part of a group of neoconservative political philosophers who promoted the intellectual idea that society’s modern ills could be solved through a revival of political and moral philosophy.
Keyes earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard in political philosophy and American government. Musically gifted, he considered a career as an opera singer but wound up taking the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Exam, qualifying for a job in the U.S. diplomatic corps.
He asked to be posted in Iran but instead was sent to India, where he met his future wife, Jocelyn. He also met another mentor, Jeane Kirkpatrick, then a Georgetown University professor attending a conference explaining America’s political and economic systems to a group of Indian academics.
Kirkpatrick, whose expertise was not economics, was having difficulty explaining some of the complexities of capitalism when a voice boomed from the back of the room.
It was Keyes.
“[He was] making a much better argument than mine,” she recalled recently. Kirkpatrick eventually became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She hired Keyes as a deputy at the UN, making him one of the highest-profile African-Americans in the Reagan administration.
At the end of Reagan’s term, Keyes ran for public office for the first time — entering the U.S. Senate race in Maryland after the GOP primary winner dropped out.
Rising star
At the time, Keyes was a rising star in the Republican Party, but he lost the 1988 race, pulling only 39 percent of the vote in the heavily Democratic state. After winning a 1992 primary, Keyes lost another race for U.S. Senate that year.
From the beginning, Keyes’ campaign style was unusual. He was roundly criticized for paying himself a salary from campaign funds in 1992 — and federal election officials launched an investigation of the practice. Though they ultimately decided it was legal, it helped turn off voters.
Instead of trying to tone down his conservative message to make it palatable to a liberal-leaning state, Keyes tried to convince people he was right. And when the GOP’s attention to him waned, he claimed racism.
“Usually in politics, it’s slapping hands, hitting as many as possible, and trying to make an initial, very positive impression,” said David Blumberg, who coordinated Baltimore operations for Keyes’ Maryland U.S. Senate races in 1988 and 1992. “In Alan Keyes’ world, you get people to support you, not because they like you, but because they agree with you on the issues.”
Though he lost his second Senate race, Keyes’ reputation, especially among religious conservatives, grew nationwide. He became a regular on the speaking circuit, earning $637,000 last year, mostly from public speaking and personal appearance fees, federal financial disclosure forms show.
Keyes also has parlayed his popularity with conservatives into hosting a radio talk show in the 1990s, and, in 2002, a cable news show called “Alan Keyes is Making Sense.”
Encouraged by several conservative leaders, Keyes entered the 1996 and 2000 Republican presidential primaries in hopes of forcing the party to continue its focus on his central issues, especially abortion.
His failed presidential bids kept Keyes’ profile high among conservatives, but they also brought political pitfalls — especially ones related to campaign finances.
Just last week, the Federal Election Commission fined his 2000 campaign for taking improper donations. And in 1995, as Keyes was preparing to run for president the first time, he had a falling out with a campaign fundraiser who claimed Keyes owed him $200,000 in fees. A lawsuit in the matter eventually was settled for $30,000.
Not here to make money
When Keyes entered the Illinois race, some critics accused him of coming to the state in part to keep his profile high and benefit his speaking career. He dismisses the idea his political career is motivated by a desire to earn money.
“Garbage like that is beneath contempt, beneath contempt,” Keyes said. “I do what I do. . . . As it says in the Bible, between me and such people, I will let God be the judge.”
In Illinois, the GOP struggled for weeks to find someone to take on Obama, who has ridden a wave of publicity in a state trending Democratic. After much wrangling between conservative and moderate leaders, the party settled on Keyes, whom conservatives argued would generate enthusiasm among Downstate voters.
But since entering the race, Keyes has kept his own counsel while constantly generating controversy, much to the chagrin of liberal Republicans and even some conservatives.
He has ripped Obama for being a “Marxist” for his views on economics. Some right-wing GOP regulars flinched when he endorsed exempting descendants of slaves from the income tax as a form of reparations. And he caused a firestorm of controversy when he said all homosexuals, including — at the prompting of a radio interviewer — Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter, engaged in “selfish hedonism.”
Whether or not he wins over his audience, Keyes’ spontaneous lecturing demonstrates one of his most astonishing abilities. He can speak eloquently without a prepared text — and usually without notes — using rhetoric that is relentlessly logical and builds to a strong point, though he sometimes takes distracting oratorical tangents along the way.
Lighter side
Despite his relentless drive to examine and shore up the moral underpinnings of American society, Keyes occasionally shows a lighter side. Soon after entering the race, Keyes sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” for a TV camera crew. The video has made its way onto the Internet.
And despite the serious, often scolding oratory Keyes displays on a podium, people turn out for his events. His emphasis on returning to what he calls the “Declaration principles” of acknowledging God in public life appeals to supporters who respond to his call to action, defying what Keyes often calls the “phony polls” that show him with little popularity.
In a park across the street from the public library in Metropolis, at the southern tip of Illinois, Keyes recently addressed a crowd of about 150 supporters — some of whom had traveled hundreds of miles to see him.
“The last couple weeks we’ve just been at every event that we can be,” said David Hall, of Ft. Worth, Texas. “We just think the world of him.”
Hall arrived at the event with his wife, Phyllis, towing a trailer decorated with a replica of the Liberty Bell flanked by two 6-foot-high plaques with the 10 Commandments on them.
Keyes obliged the crowd with a stirring speech whose themes have echoed throughout the state in the last two months. Standing in a gazebo as the early autumn light faded, Keyes exhorted his listeners to recognize what is at risk Nov. 2.
“I know how to find my way to people who understand America’s principles, who share its decent conscience and who will stand in defense of its true values,” Keyes bellowed, wagging his index finger in the air. “And that is . . . what is at stake in this Senate race — our principles, our conscience and our true values.”
