Hey! What happened to Alan Keyes?

January 6th, 2008 at 08:17pm Pat Cunningham

I’ve had a strange sense for several days now that something in the presidential race suddenly has vanished. It finally dawned on me Sunday afternoon that Alan Keyes seems to  have disappeared.

Upon investigation, I find that Keyes is still a presidential candidate and still has a WEB SITE. He was in one of the debates a few weeks ago, and he got some votes in last week’s Iowa caucuses (but the Iowa Republican Party apparently REFUSES to say how many).

But his lack of money and the media’s understandable reluctance to pay him much mind has reduced him to a political nonentity, at least with respect to the presidential race. 

 Some of us here in Illinois have a weird fondness for Keyes stemming from his quixotic (to put it politely) race against Democrat Barack Obama for a U.S. Senate seat back in 2004.

Keyes, who had gained some national notice when he ran for president in 1996 and 2000,  was recruited for the Illinois contest by Rockford State Sen. Dave Syverson, among others, when the winner of the GOP primary had to drop out in a sex scandal.

Keyes didn’t even live in Illinois, but the Republican poohbahs seemed to figure that their own articulate black guy could fare well against Obama, so they got him to move here from Maryland.

The result was a disaster. Keyes pompously declared that his candidacy was “God’s will,” and opined that Jesus Christ wouldn’t vote for Obama. He referred to Vice President Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter as “a selfish hedonist” and denounced all homosexuals, including his own daughter.

Keyes quickly became a statewide joke and ended up with only 27 percent of the vote.

When he slinked away from that humiliation, I figured we’d seen the last of him.  But, without anybody noticing, he announced his candidacy for president just this past September.  Then, suddenly, there he was on the stage at a GOP debate in Des Moines last month. His presence, not surprisingly, prompted disdain among conservative pundits who once regarded him with more respect.

Roy Edroso at Alicublog has more on Keyes HERE.
 

Entry Filed under: Alan Keyes