Quixotic Candidate Puts GOP on Notice

Things can get a little strange on the campaign trail with Alan Keyes.

Doors pop open on airplanes in midflight. Volunteers pray in tongues. Crowds leap to their feet. And there are hunger strikes, arrests and personalized checks featuring the candidate’s grinning visage.

Keyes, a former diplomat and radio talk show host with a penchant for opera singing and astronomy, is apparently the first black person to contend for the Republican presidential nomination.

Ignored by the media and written off by pundits, he has nevertheless mesmerized crowds with his oratory and possibly redefined the debate over abortion. As he continues his quixotic bid for the White House, some observers predict he could be around for years to come.

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In a darkened movie theater in Cerritos, a 19-foot-tall Keyes looms on the screen via a live satellite feed from Sacramento. It’s a Wednesday evening, and six theaters around the state are broadcasting this “interactive” speech as part of Keyes’ final push for votes in the California primary.

In Cerritos, people call in questions from a lobby telephone near a talking fortuneteller machine called “Carmen the Gypsy.”

Carmen is silent, but it doesn’t take a clairvoyant to figure out Keyes’ chances of capturing the nomination. Even the candidate says winning was never important. After all, this is less a campaign than a crusade.

It began with an eight-minute verbal fusillade in New England in February 1995. The speech was later aired by a syndicated Christian radio program, “Focus on the Family,” which was then deluged with 10,000 calls and letters from people wondering, “Who is this guy?”

It’s a question not easily answered.

A 45-year-old former altar boy who grew up on military bases, Keyes is a study in contradictions: A black Catholic whose following is mostly among white evangelical Protestants, a fierce defender of morality whose campaign skirts the boundaries of questionable ethics, a Harvard PhD who looks for philosophical messages in “Star Trek” and a gifted orator who once quit public speaking for 10 years out of fear that his effect on audiences was merely a verbal trick.

“He’s a force of nature,” says longtime friend Paul Rahe.

Keyes’ political views incubated during the upheaval of the 1960s, when he attended Cornell University. Studying under Allan Bloom, who would later gain fame for the conservative manifesto “The Closing of the American Mind,” he made waves challenging a group of black militants, who reportedly then threatened his life, prompting him to drop out.

He wound up at Harvard, earned a doctorate in government and embarked on what could have been an obscure diplomatic career at the American consulate in Bombay.

There, however, he befriended U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, who helped Keyes move up the State Department food chain under President Reagan. That, in turn, gave him visibility as a member of that rare species, the conservative black, which opened doors to gigs as a syndicated newspaper columnist, radio host and losing candidate--twice--for the U.S. Senate in Maryland.

“They call me Dr. Dream and the doctor is in,” Keyes would intone on his three-hour talk show.

The radio program was a way to road test the ideas now propelling his presidential campaign, says close friend Marlo Lewis.

In essence, what Keyes has done is take the mantra of the last election--”It’s the economy, stupid”--and turn it on its head.

“We don’t have money problems; we have moral problems,” he says. “Do you think young people are raping and robbing and killing . . . because they have to pay a progressive income tax?”

Keyes blames crime--and a host of other social ills--on the disintegration of two-parent families and on abortion.

But to the surprise of some Christians, his chief argument isn’t the Bible. It’s the Declaration of Independence, which Keyes applies to the unborn in much the same fashion President Lincoln applied it to slaves.

The argument isn’t easily boiled down to a pithy quote--and Keyes admits the logic might not even fly outside the United States--but the gist is this: Slavery and abortion are about treating human life like property, which violates the Declaration’s assertion that all men are created equal and endowed with rights by God.

If those rights come from someone other than God--such as Congress or the courts--then by definition they can also be taken away, he reasons. Find enough votes to repeal the 13th Amendment and slavery is again legal. So Keyes, like Lincoln, turns to the nation’s founding document. According to the Declaration, he says, no person can ever claim authority to own, define or abort a human life.

“Maybe we can’t agree about [God] in the details, but we can agree that wherever we get our rights, it’s from a source beyond ourselves,” he explains.

When TV’s Larry King tried to point out that “we live under a Constitution, not that Declaration,” Keyes shot back: “The Declaration of Independence is higher than any law. . . . The Constitution was written in light of [its] principles.”

Keyes, who wears a gold lapel pin designed in the shape of a 10-week-old fetus’ feet, also contends that lack of respect for life in the womb has poisoned the culture at large. He says it fuels everything from rudeness to violent crime: It sends a message to people “that they are God and that they get to decide . . . what the worth of another person is.”

Loyola Marymount University professor Michael Genovese says the Declaration theory has been tried before--by various conservative commentators--without much success. Keyes is “the first presidential vehicle for it,” Genovese adds, but most voters still aren’t buying it.

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Other issues on Keyes’ platform include abolishing the IRS (the ultimate flat tax), dismantling welfare (churches and charities can do a better job), promoting school vouchers (parents should decide what their children learn, not bureaucrats) and ending gun control (“If you put a pistol on the floor . . . is it going to walk around the room and start shooting people? Killing doesn’t start on the outside. It starts on the inside.”).

The combination has attracted an unusually devoted contingent of fans. They host video parties to showcase his fiery speeches, which Keyes always delivers without notes. They petition God on his behalf via the “Alan Keyes Prayer Network” on the Internet. And at least 1,000 use personalized checks imprinted with his face and slogans.

Keyes, too, has detoured into unorthodox campaign territory.

After being barred from one candidates debate, he fasted from food and liquid for several days. When he was disinvited to a second forum, he slept in a tent outside the sponsoring TV station and later was arrested trying to enter the studio.

It was the most publicity he’s received the entire campaign. Even comedians couldn’t resist. The image of Atlanta cops hauling away a guy who might be the first black to seek the Republican nomination (GOP officials say historical records are unclear) provided rare fodder.

Dennis Miller joked: “Keyes said that as a black man, he was ‘outraged’ [by his own arrest], but as a Republican he ‘hopes the police will keep up the good work.’ ”

(Genovese says race otherwise hasn’t been a factor in Keyes’ bid, but he suggests it would have been if the candidate had threatened to win. “At the end, race becomes an issue,” Genovese says, pointing to Tom Bradley’s last-minute poll dive in the 1986 governor’s race against George Deukmejian.)

Adding to the campaign’s unpredictability is its mostly volunteer staff and shoestring budget. One newspaper writer reportedly spent months phoning and faxing Keyes’ offices before anyone called back.

And in California, the candidate has relied on campaign coordinators who pray in tongues to resolve scheduling snafus--and on a twin-engine airplane that had a door burst open at 5,000 feet.

Keyes also has been shadowed by ethics questions.

In 1992, for instance, any chance he had of winning Democrat Barbara Mikulski’s U.S. Senate seat in Maryland dissipated after revelations he was paying himself $100,000 a year from campaign funds--a legal but controversial move.

He eventually stopped but remains unrepentant. “If you’re running for office full time, how are you supposed to live?” he asks.

Even the Federal Election Commission has reportedly deadlocked on the issue, fearing that a ban on such salaries might prevent anyone who isn’t rich from seeking office.

When asked if $100,000 was excessive, Keyes says, “Candidates shouldn’t be allowed to profiteer. If your [normal salary] is $40,000, you shouldn’t be able to pay yourself $100,000.” But he says the amount he took was 65% less than his pre-campaign income.

More recently, the Baltimore Sun took Keyes to task for using paid presidential campaign staffers to arrange personal speaking engagements--and for riding to work at his radio station in a campaign-rented limo, both possible violations of federal rules barring personal use of campaign money.

“Why are you insulting my intelligence with these stupid questions?” he said when the paper quizzed him about the matter. The next day, his campaign faulted any irregularities or mistakes on an ex-aide who was a source for the story. (The aide disputed those allegations.)

In addition, the Washington Post disclosed in January that Keyes hadn’t filed a financial disclosure form with the FEC, despite requests from the agency going back nearly a year.

Campaign officials called it an oversight and submitted documents the day after the Post article. The FEC, however, says the forms are incomplete.

But Keyes seems unfazed by such matters--or by Sen. Bob Dole’s stranglehold on the nomination. The goal of his campaign isn’t winning, he has said all along. It’s about pressuring the GOP not to water down its stances against abortion and for traditional two-parent families.

So even though Keyes has slowed his pace since California, he’s hardly given up. Last week, he crisscrossed Pennsylvania, and next he visits North Carolina. Aides figure he’ll continue through the last primaries June 4, then speak at a few state Republican conventions before heading for the national bash in San Diego this summer.

Beyond that, the candidate has made no plans, but he mentions radio, newspaper columns and the speaking circuit (for which he earns a reported $500 to $5,000 an appearance) as possibilities.

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Off the campaign trail, Keyes is described as intense and brilliant. He enjoys singing (he once trained for a career in opera) and occasionally dissecting episodes of “Star Trek.”

But aside from that, “He’s the most unfrivolous person I know,” says Lewis, who met Keyes at Harvard. “What he lives, eats, sleeps and breathes is the fate of America. When my wife and I go over to his house, we’ll talk about computers or sports, but eventually the conversation gets around to the issues.

“What you see in public is very much the man you see in private. Not that he gives speeches in his living room, but the conversations are high-energy. . . . Basically he is his ideas.”

Even in college, Keyes could get lost in abstractions. Lewis recalls a summer cross-country trip in which “we got into this debate over whether Shakespeare was a poet who philosophized or a philosopher who wrote poetry. We got so embroiled in the discussion that neither of us was watching the fuel tank and we ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere.”

Keyes met his homemaker wife, Jocelyn, a Calcutta native who speaks with a lilting British accent, when he worked in Bombay. She came to the consulate office for a visa and Keyes asked her out.

“I was turned down,” he sighs.

But her sister later invited him to a dinner party and Keyes came away from that event convinced that “my fate had been decided. . . . I remember saying to the other consular officer with me that I’d met the woman I was going to marry.”

He proposed on Pearl Harbor Day in 1980, and today they have three children and a golden retriever named Jason.

At home, Keyes also keeps a prized telescope with a built-in computer that tracks objects through the sky. It reminds Lewis of a novel written by Winston Churchill. The book features a character who spends his days worrying about the fate of the British empire, and his evenings peering into the heavens to remind himself of the relative smallness of human affairs and his own role in them.

Keyes might be doing the same thing, Lewis suggests: Pondering the problems of America, then gazing skyward to remind himself of his own insignificance in the universe.

Of course, he could achieve the same effect by looking at his standings in the primaries: 4% in California, 1% in Nevada, 5% in Washington. . . .

Still, Rahe predicts Keyes will be on the scene “a very long time.”

“When the current crop [of politicians] fades and disappears from the stage . . . he’s got a real shot,” says Rahe, who chairs the history department at the University of Tulsa. “The degree to which he’s going to be a force in American politics is not yet visible.”

Rush Limbaugh called Keyes “a tsunami waiting to happen.” And even Jesse Jackson has weighed in with kind notice. “I hope he wins,” Jackson said after Keyes declared his candidacy. “[He] is less mean than Gramm, more clear than Dole and more intellectually honest than Buchanan.”

But Loyola professor Genovese believes Keyes’ role is fleeting: “He’s merely a footnote. . . . Twenty years from now, he’ll be a good Trivial Pursuit question.”