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The Buying of the President 1996

Alan Keyes

Candidates hardly ever receive salaries from their campaigns. When they do, the pay is not usually very high. Asked by a reporter for The Washington Times about the fact that he was taking a salary of $8,463 a month from his unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign in 1992, Keyes’s response was: “I am a successful person. You want me to come work for you, you have got to pay me a certain minimum. That’s where I’m established in life. If I don’t breathe, eat, and live comfortably I won’t be able to function.”

Keyes faces a daunting task in seeking the 1996 Republican presidential nomination. He has practically no name recognition or campaign organization and has little fundraising ability. Because he has been unable to win even state office, the national media have largely ignored his candidacy, and relatively few people seem to take his campaign seriously. Keyes declined to be interviewed for this book.

After getting his Ph.D. in government from Harvard, Keyes joined the foreign service. He attracted the attention of U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, and soon found himself elevated to the post of U.S. representative to the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council. The position carried with it the title of ambassador. To this day, his aides refer to him as “Ambassador Keyes.”

Keyes served at the United Nations from 1983 until 1985, when he became Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations. After leaving the State Department, Keyes spent a short time in residence at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, a Washington think tank. He was already being mentioned as a possible Republican candidate.

In 1988, a fortuitous series of circumstances led Keyes to run in Maryland for the U.S. Senate. In June, the Republican nominee abruptly pulled out of the race and Jeane Kirkpatrick, Keyes’s former boss at the United Nations, recommended him to Republican Party officials in Maryland. Neither of the state’s two Republican members of Congress, Helen Bentley and Connie Morella, was interested in challenging incumbent Senator Paul Sarbanes. The door was left open for Keyes, who handily won the party’s nomination at a special convention.

In the general election, however, Keyes was no match for Sarbanes. He managed to raise only $662,000, an unimpressive sum for a U.S. Senate race, and less than half of what Sarbanes spent. His message of moralistic conservatism didn’t play particularly well in Maryland, a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than two to one. In the end, he garnered 38 percent of the vote.

When he ran again in 1992, this time against incumbent Senator Barbara Mikulski, he was given even less of a chance than he had the first time. His campaign was especially hurt by the revelation that he drew a salary. On Election Day, Keyes could muster only 29 percent of the vote.

Keyes, who is black, defended the 1988 Bush presidential campaign’s use of the infamous “Willie Horton” ad, calling the furor it caused “disingenuous.” He has called Jesse Jackson “a shill for the usual establishment agenda.” He is clearly willing to identify racist motives in others, even his own party. In an article he wrote after his first Senate defeat, he charged the media with both liberal bias and racism, saying they had portrayed his candidacy as tokenism and not as a serious campaign. In 1992, he accused the Republican Party of abandoning him because of his race. “I do not believe there is a sincere commitment on the part of the Republican Party leadership,” he said, “to reach out to the black community.”

After losing in 1988, Keyes established the Campaign for Maryland’s Future. The PAC’s ostensible aim was to support Republican candidates in Maryland. It soon became apparent, however, that the group served to support only one candidate: Alan Keyes. In fact, in 1992, the PAC donated $5,000 to Keyes, then became his official campaign committee. Keyes also spent time between his races as the president of Citizens Against Government Waste, a Washington group that seeks to streamline government programs.

The National Rifle Association is Keyes’s largest donor, mostly because of an independent expenditure for communications made on his behalf in 1992. During his first run in 1988, Maryland passed a significant gun-control law, which Keyes vigorously opposed. To avoid the appearance that his opposition to the law was a result of the NRA’s financial support, Keyes held a press conference and announced that he was refusing to accept any contributions from the organization. In Keyes’s 1992 race, however, the NRA came through for him. It gave him $7,306 in direct donations and spent $14,903 on communications, making the organization far and away Keyes’s top giver.

No other PAC has made significant contributions to Keyes. The National Right to Life PAC did reward his ardent pro-life position with an $8,530 independent expenditure in 1992, but no other interests have made similar infusions. The reason is clear: When PACs make donations, they assume something will be done in return, and Keyes has simply not been in a position to do it for them.

A look at Keyes’s individual campaign donors does not reveal any well-known “fat cats” or scions of traditional American wealth. His most notable contributors have been foreign policy experts like Jeane Kirkpatrick, former National Security Council official Constantine Menges, and conservative intellectual Irving Kristol. Keyes has connections in the Republican intelligentsia, but the economic elite has been largely unsupportive.

While he may not have accumulated the holdings of some of the other presidential candidates, Keyes is a wealthy man, earning well into six figures. He owns a house in suburban Maryland that he purchased in 1989 for $490,000. He had a radio show in Baltimore, which has since gone off the air. As of this writing, Keyes had yet to file (despite repeated requests) the required material disclosure form with the FEC, so it is unclear how much he is worth. During his 1992 Senate race, however, he said publicly that his 1991 income was almost $300,000. Keyes is not drawing a salary from his presidential campaign.

Keyes portrays his campaign as a crusade to restore traditional values to America. Many see it as a tactic to champion the anti-abortion cause. His campaign is considered quixotic even by some who know him well. On hearing that he planned to run for president, his 1992 Senate campaign manager, Susan Saum-Wicklein, said, incredulously, “He’s doing what?” The former chairman of the Maryland Republican Party said, “I think this shows that in the United States of America, anyone can run for president.”

Keyes, with characteristic immodesty, describes himself as one of the country’s best public speakers, but has had little success persuading people to open their checkbooks. In fact, bad financial luck seems to follow him. In July 1995, he revealed that his campaign had discovered certain “discrepancies” in his exploratory committee, namely that $58,000 had inexplicably disappeared. The finance director quit and refused to turn over his files. To an anemic campaign that an FEC report indicated had only $38,005 in the bank at the time, such a loss was crippling.

Keyes, undaunted, kept campaigning, firm in his conviction that he should be president.