While Alan Keyes presents no real worries for Barack Obama, the Illinois Republican Party should be very worried about becoming the laughingstock of the nation and turning off moderate voters for years to come. Bill Maher joked on Friday that the same party that couldn't find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has now proven its incompetence at a far easier task--they couldn't find a black man in Chicago.
And that's a sad fact for the party to face--that it sought a black man to run against Obama because...well, it's hard to say what Republican leaders were thinking. Already it appears that many party leaders, former contender Kirk Dillard among them, are distancing themselves from Keyes, letting on that they realize his positions are deeply polarizing and, at least in Illinois, very unpopular. You can bet the ever-popular Jim Edgar won't be out campaigning for this right-wing nut job.
Keyes is a man without a place, which makes it almost appropriate that he swoop into a state three months before an election to run for office: His "conservative" views put him firmly in the mainstream among white men in Mississippi, while the color of his skin would make him unelectable there; meanwhile, anyplace populated by people who would elect a black man to the Senate has, in reaching that state of enlightenment, also soundly rejected Keyes' bombastic pronouncements about the rule of law being the rule of God. And yes, that's what he says--take a look:
By nominating Keyes, the Illinois G.O.P. has revealed itself as a cynical and desperate institution, uninterested in appealing to the voters of the state of Illinois and incapable of adapting to a world that has grown beyond the tired and outmoded platitudes of its new standard-bearer. The resounding defeat to which Keyes will be treated this fall will be a well-deserved thumping for a party that, in this state, should already have learned its lesson.
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