Because they need to take some more to make the next three months seem palatable.
— If all goes as expected tomorrow, Illinois will enjoy a U.S. Senate campaign like none this nation has seen literally since 1858. That campaign also happened to be in Illinois and featured our state’s standard-bearer, Abraham Lincoln, and Stephen Douglas.
In 1858 Douglas won the race but Lincoln won the history. It is our hope that this year the Republican will win the election as well as the history.
Lincoln’s going to rise from the grave and sue someone for libel if they are actually comparing him to Alan Keyes.
That said, the basic problem left out of this whole process is this clown has run two campaigns for Senate and lost handily both times. Why is this going to be different? Did anyone in the Central Committee meeting bring this up? Or did everyone not bother to think about why he lost the last two times? If he’s so damn inspiring why isn’t he speaking from the Senate Floor instead of on the radio?
What? Is he all of a sudden going to hit Illinois voters with a wingnut spell of quackery and all of a sudden they start yabbering about Natural Law?
Next they’ll be claiming he’s giving the Sermon on the Mount….
But Keyes has to abhor all this hype, right? After all, he’s the one who said, ?We stand on the threshold of an era when the greatest temptation will be to take overweening pride in our seeming achievements and to regard them with a sense of self-sufficiency that releases us from the boundaries of ordinary moral judgment,? Keyes wrote in WorldNet Daily Exclusive Commentary in 2000. ?What could be more necessary than the humbling and limiting acknowledgment that there is, in fact, a God, and we are not Him?”
Quote at
http://www.georgiabulletin.org/local/2004/06/03/Speakers/
Have you noticed how often Keyes and his supporters cite 19th century politicians and precedents? It’s almost like they think they actually are fighting the political battles of that century, not debating the issues facing 21st century America.
I liked Josh Marshall’s comments about Keyes’s eloquence — that it is spellbinding, but has a cartoonish quality about it. Having read some of his speeches and columns, I have an rudimentary theory about this.
Keyes’s grammar and syntax are not modern. He has more in common with orators from the 19th century than he does with the great speakers (Reagan, Clinton, Blair, Obama) of our day.
Doesn’t this sound like Keyes: “I now wish to ask you whether that principle was right or wrong which guaranteed to every State and every community the right to form and regulate their domestic institutions to suit themselves.”
It’s not a Keyes quote; it’s a sentence from Stephen Douglas’s speech at one of the debates in 1858.
What about this one: “The practical foundation of all the rights and privileges of the individual citizen is the rights that inhere in the citizen body as a whole, the rights of the people and of the state governments. The latter effectively embody their ability to resist abuses of national power. Such rights include the right to elect representatives, and to be governed by laws made and enforced through them.”
That’s Keyes in 2003, even though it sounds like Douglas in 1858.
The theory is this: Keyes lives in the 19th century. He has adopted the trappings of a free black man from that time period, and it informs his opinions, his manners, his outlook, and even his speaking style.
I admit, this is just a rough theory — but it certainly explains why Keyes ignores every constitutional and political development since the Civil War.
Indeed. I hope someone digs this out and reads it very soon.
“His 1979 doctoral dissertation, “Ambition and Statesmanship,” was based on the writings of Alexander Hamilton and inspired, according to his graduate adviser, by a wickedly insightful quote from Hamilton: “Love of fame (is) the ruling passion of the noblest minds.”
“He is not lacking in self-confidence,” said Jack Pitney, a former Republican National Committee official who now teaches politics at Claremont McKenna College.”
http://www.theunionleader.com/Gourmet_show.html?article=1925&archive=1
Is he even on the radio in IL?