Aug 092004
I was curious as to how Alan Keyes was going to get around the destruction of federalism and run for Senate in Illinois. Josh Marshall tells us how:
Harkening back to the wisdom of no one in particular, Keyes intoned, “I deeply resent the destruction of federalism represented by Hillary Clinton’s willingness to go into a state she doesn’t even live in and pretend to represent people there. So I certainly wouldn’t imitate it.”
The best walk back I heard for this one was the response from a Republican party official in Illinois a few days ago — as related to me by a TPM reader — who, when confronted with this seeming change of mind, shot back that … you guessed it, 9/11 changed everything!
Clearly, something like that is far too banal for Keyes. So he described his flash of light on the road to Chicago experience like this …
As Keyes told his new Illinois supporters today, he was at first dead-set against running for senate in another state. But then he was shown copies of Barack Obama’s state legislative voting record and he decided he had no choice — flip flop or no flip flop — but to jump into the ring.
“I’ll tell you by the time I got through the records, I was convinced that somebody had to run against Barack Obama,” he said.
And then after this long dark night of the soul Keyes spent with Obama’s voting records he decided that “I must leave the land of my forefathers [i.e., Maryland] in order to defend the land of my spirit, of my conscience and my heart — and I believe that that land is Illinois.”
Only Keyes could manage to bring a flourish to the rather prosaic work of backing out of backing out of a flat promise or turning a flip-flop into something vaguely reminiscent of St. Paul’s decision to abandon the teachings of the Pharisees and launch off on foot around the shores of the Mediterranean preaching Christ crucified.
Hey, at least Keyes didn’t call Obama the AntiChrist!
