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Alan Keyes, the radio talk-show host and former diplomat who refuses to follow Lamar Alexander, Dan Quayle, Elizabeth Dole, Orrin Hatch, Gary Bauer and Steve Forbes out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, is a man in perpetual motion.
But one thing stays put: Keyes' message never changes. No one gives him a ghost of a chance of winning the nomination against Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Arizona Sen. John McCain, but Keyes is not merely campaigning. He is crusading.
"Most of the challenges that we face are fundamentally not challenges that money could address," Keyes told another crowd, his speech quickening, his arms rising toward the ceiling. "They are challenges that involve questions about our moral character, our moral understanding, our moral commitment, about the kind of things we do, not because we get money for them, but because they're right."
THE ROAD TO THE WHITE HOUSE
Alan Keyes, the radio talk-show host and former diplomat who refuses to follow Lamar Alexander, Dan Quayle, Elizabeth Dole, Orrin Hatch, Gary Bauer and Steve Forbes out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, is a man in perpetual motion.
His hands gesture constantly. His feet carry him from side to side, his body turns this way and that, as he makes sure no one in his audience feels ignored. Even his voice moves, riding the scale in pitch while his volume rises and dips to emphasize first one point, then the next.
But one thing stays put: Keyes' message never changes. No one gives him a ghost of a chance of winning the nomination against Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Arizona Sen. John McCain, but Keyes is not merely campaigning. He is crusading.
After Bill Clinton's shaming of the presidency, Keyes insists to everyone in earshot, nothing less than the moral salvation of America is at stake.
"There has in fact been an egregious failure of moral stewardship on the part not only of the president, but on the part of the party that circled the wagons around his lies, his corruption, his betrayal of oath and conscience," Keyes proclaimed recently at the National Press Club in Washington.
Beyond Clinton's depravity, Keyes says, the country's very soul is in jeopardy, because its children are denied the moral teaching and discipline that he believes made the great experiment of democracy a success.
"Most of the challenges that we face are fundamentally not challenges that money could address," Keyes told another crowd, his speech quickening, his arms rising toward the ceiling. "They are challenges that involve questions about our moral character, our moral understanding, our moral commitment, about the kind of things we do, not because we get money for them, but because they're right."
Keyes' world is one where there is little danger of confusing right and wrong, where faith in God holds America's best hope for the future and where a secular culture threatens to doom the last, best hope of mankind.
For him, nothing marks the country's fall from grace so clearly as abortion. He mocks the argument that carrying a child to term is a "mother's choice." The U.S. Constitution, Keyes argues, makes no room for abortion.
He wears a crucifix on a gold chain outside his shirt but behind his tie. His coat lapel bears a gold pin depicting the feet of a fetus.
"We are killing our children," Keyes said. "It threatens our very freedom. If the unborn are not safe, no one is safe."
Keyes, 49, wasn't always a one-note moralist.
Marlo Lewis, a Harvard chum whose wife works for Keyes' campaign, recalls the young Keyes as "brilliant, original and funny, with sort of just a great love of life."
Keyes was born in New York City on Aug. 7, 1950, into a family steeped in military tradition. His father was an Army sergeant, and the family moved around a lot.
The future presidential candidate grew up in segregated Georgia, and spent time in Italy and Texas, graduating from Robert G. Cole High School in San Antonio. Even then an award-winning debater, Keyes said he was politically curious from an early age, even though his parents were not very active on that front.
Keyes briefly attended Cornell University, but left in part because he opposed the Vietnam War protests and the takeover of a campus building by rifle-toting black students. Keyes received death threats for speaking out against his fellow black students, his old pal Lewis said.
Lewis remembers Keyes as a talented singer and musician. At one point, he said, Keyes considered a career as an opera singer. At another, he toyed with following his father into the military. But he received student deferments and later a high draft-lottery number, so he never served, despite coming of age during the Vietnam War.
Keyes' father told him, "I fought in three wars so you wouldn't have to," Lewis said.
After earning bachelor's and doctoral degrees in government from Harvard, Keyes found his way into the civilian side of the federal government. From 1978 to 1983, he served in various State Department posts. As a member of the policy planning staff headed by Paul Wolfowitz, who is now a key foreign policy and defense adviser to Bush, Keyes was a spokesman for so-called "constructive engagement" with the apartheid government of South Africa.
He then spent two years as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, and three more as assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs.
Although Keyes talks derisively of politicians and the media, he's belonged to both clubs. He twice ran for the U.S. Senate from Maryland, and this is his second bid for the White House. He wrote a syndicated newspaper column in the early 1990s and spent the last half of the decade on AM radio as host of "The Alan Keyes Show: America's Wake-up Call."
Even granting Keyes' moral sincerity, skeptics note that he has everything to gain from staying in the race even if it is hopeless. By sharing the stage with more credible candidates for the Oval Office, Keyes enhances both his future celebrity and his speaking fees.
So his crusade rolls on, as he turns virtually every question into a sermon on morality. What's to be done about agriculture? Step in with a special banking system that allows bumper crops to be stored for leaner times and save the family farm. The family farm, by his reckoning, is the "nursery of America's moral character."
What about income taxes? Keyes contends they put control of all money in government hands. He calls them "slave taxes" and says they should be eliminated. Instead, Keyes would impose a national sales tax with exemptions for life's necessities, such as food, medicine and clothing.
He favors school vouchers that would allow parents to route tax dollars into private schools. Keyes speaks with disgust of "government schools," places he says have sacrificed discipline and classic education on an altar of liberal political agendas.
Beyond that, his campaign doesn't much bother with specifics. There is little room for that, after all, when the candidate is concerned with bigger things, like calling America to task for its moral failings.
Talking to Rotary clubs, high schools or business luncheons Keyes plays the part of a congenial man of letters. He is always extemporaneous. He repeats themes from one place to the next, but in original, often eloquent language.
His spontaneous volubility is often on display in debates among GOP presidential hopefuls, although Keyes sometimes turns strident, haranguing his fellow candidates. He often accuses them of dodging the nation's most important issues - his issues - out of fear of dashing their political fortunes.
Even a senior adviser to Bush acknowledges that Keyes is an extraordinary debater.
"If this were about how well you do in debates," the adviser said, "He'd be 50 points ahead."
PHOTO; Caption: PHOTO: Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press: Alan Keyes at a rally Thursday.
Copyright Post Gazette Publishing Company Feb 20, 2000