The Buying of the President 2000
Alan Keyes
In a burst of candor, Robert Dole took to the Senate floor on April 10, 1989, and told his colleagues “PACs give to incumbents, and that is me and the other incumbents in this chamber, because access to an officeholder is more important than a member [of Congress]’s party, ideology, or even voting record on the issues.”
Therein lies the problem for Alan Keyes. Although the Republican has ideology to spare, he’s never held elective office. He lost two bids for a seat in the U.S. Senate from Maryland, and in his previous presidential campaign he was never able to win more than 7 percent of the vote in any primary.
So the question for Keyes in 2000 is much the same as it was in 1996: not whether he has a shot at his party’s nomination, but whether he has a chance to mount a serious effort as an also-ran. If the past is any guide, Keyes doesn’t have much of a chance.
The August 23, 1999 edition of Newsweek magazine featured a brief story on the Republican straw poll results out of Ames, Iowa. It mentioned all but one of the challengers for the Republican nomination, including front-runner George W. Bush, who won the event; Lamar Alexander, who dropped out of the race after his poor showing; and even John McCain, who didn’t even bother to show up in Ames. Only Alan Keyes’s name was nowhere to be read. The photograph that accompanied, the piece showed all the candidates who competed in the straw poll on the stage; Keyes was hidden behind a waving Dan Quayle, barely visible.
Much like his cash-poor campaign.
For Keyes, the Iowa straw poll was a step up from some of his experiences in 1996. Keyes was arrested and hauled away in handcuffs when he tried to crash a televised debate for Republican candidates at an Atlanta television station on March 3, 1996. WSB-TV invited only the top four GOP candidates: Dole, Buchanan, Forbes, and Alexander. Keyes, who was still an active candidate at the time, screamed, “I have a right to speak,” as his hands were cuffed behind his back and he was led to a waiting police car.
Oddly enough, Keyes was never charged or even booked after his arrest. He was driven around Atlanta for about 20 minutes and then dropped off in a parking lot by a City Hall annex. In essence, he’d been abducted from the steps of WSB-TV’s headquarters on Peachtree Street, driven far enough away that he couldn’t cause any further trouble, and let go. William Campbell, the mayor of Atlanta, drove to the parking lot and offered Keyes a ride. Keyes accepted the mayor’s offer and promised him he wouldn’t blame the police for the incident. Keyes threatened to sue WSB-TV for barring him from the debate. (Keyes, however, didn’t follow through on his threat.)
The non-arrest may have marked the high point in Keyes’s campaign — he was invited to participate in two subsequent debates, one in Dallas and another in Miami, shortly after the Atlanta incident — even as it underscored the bizarreness of his campaign.
Keyes is a black conservative whose most ardent supporters are Christian anti-abortion activists and hard-line Jewish supporters of Israel. He protested the advantages of incumbency by paying himself a salary with contributions to his 1992 Senate campaign. He attacks the corrosive role of money in politics, yet his own campaigns have been plagued by financial and ethical irregularities.
Despite his problems with campaign money, the detention in Atlanta, his low name recognition, and his lack of a strong organization, Keyes managed to get himself on the ballot for 32 Republican primaries in 1996. His best showing was not in a primary, however, but in the Iowa caucuses, where he drew 7 percent of the vote.
Keyes was an Army brat, the youngest of five children in a family that moved frequently from base to base. Neither of his parents graduated from college, but they stressed to their children the importance of higher education. During Keyes’ junior year in high school, he won the American Legion’s national oratorical contest with a speech titled “The Blessings of Liberty, the Blessings of Life.”
In an interview with a reporter for The Washington Post in 1992, Keyes said the speech “was about being proactive in defending freedom and the principles of justice,” adding, “It’s actually very much like the speech I give now.”
Keyes was a good student, won college scholarships, and enrolled in Cornell University, but he left for Paris after a year. On his return to the United States, he transferred to Harvard University, where he finished his undergraduate education in 1972 and went on to get a Ph.D. in government in 1979.
After finishing his doctoral work, Keyes joined the foreign service. There, he attracted the attention of Jeane Kirkpatrick, the U.S. representative to the United Nations, and Keyes soon found himself elevated to the post of U.S. representative to the U.N. Economic and Social Council.
While there, he managed to infuriate some civil rights organizations. While nearly all Democrats and many Republicans on Capitol Hill were calling for sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa, the Reagan administration opposed them. Keyes publicly supported the administration’s position.
“I think it is racist to suggest that my mind should somehow be bound by black instead of reason,” Keyes later explained in a January 1996 interview with a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. “I will follow reason, and reason has no color. It doesn’t have a skin.”
In 1988, he defended the Bush campaign’s use of the infamous “Willie Horton” ad, calling the furor that it caused “disingenuous.” But Keyes has been willing to play the racism card when it suits his political ambitions. In an article he wrote after his first losing Senate campaign, he charged the news media with both liberal bias and racism, saying that they had portrayed his candidacy as tokenism and not as a serious campaign. And 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.”
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 conservative Washington think tank. He was already being mentioned as a possible Republican candidate for Congress.
In 1988 a fortuitous series of circumstances led Keyes to run for the U.S. Senate from Maryland. In June the Republican nominee abruptly pulled out of the race, and Kirkpatrick, Keyes’s former boss at the United Nations, recommended him to officials of the Maryland Republican Party. Neither of the state’s two Republican House Members, Helen Bentley and Constance Morella, was interested in challenging Paul Sarbanes, the popular Democratic incumbent. The door was left open for Keyes, who handily won the party’s nomination at a special convention.
In the general election Keyes was no match for Sarbanes. He managed to raise only $662,000, an unimpressive sum for a Senate race, and less than half of what Sarbanes raised. Keyes’s message of moralistic conservatism didn’t play particularly well in Maryland, a state where Democrats outnumbered Republicans by more than two-to-one. In the end he garnered 38 percent of the vote.
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 it donated $5,000 to Keyes, then became his official campaign committee. Keyes also spent time between his campaigns as the president of Citizens Against Government Waste.
When Keyes ran for the Senate again in 1992 — this time against Barbara Mikulski, another popular incumbent — he was given even less of a chance than he had the first time. His campaign was especially hurt by the revelation that he was using campaign contributions to pay himself a salary.
Candidates hardly ever receive salaries from their campaigns. When they do, the pay is not usually very high. When Alan Keyes was asked about why he was drawing a salary of $8,463 a month from his U.S. Senate campaign in 1992, his 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.”
Even now, aides in Keyes’s presidential campaign defend his decision to pay himself from his Senate campaign coffers. Mary Lewis, the chief of staff of Keyes’s campaign, pointed out that those in office still draw their taxpayer-funded salaries while running for reelection. “They all know how fundamentally unfairly they’ve stacked the deck,” Lewis told the Center for Public Integrity. “Alan thought he would be able to make a strong public case against the disproportionate advantages and featherbedding that the laws the incumbents wrote themselves allow.”
Unfortunately for Keyes, he wasn’t able to make the public case in 1992, and lost to Mikulski in a landslide. He received just 29 percent of the vote.
Given Keyes’s electoral track record — 0 for 2 — it surprised many when he announced in 1995 that he would seek the Republican nomination for president. When the idea was first suggested to Keyes, in fact, he was surprised as well. In 1994, Arthur Rocker, a political consultant from Georgia, met with Keyes in Nashville, Tennessee, to urge him to run. “My reaction was, ‘Excuse me? This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I just got through losing two Senate races and you’re coming and asking me to run for president?’” Keyes told The Baltimore Sun in a July 1995 interview.
Others echoed Keyes’ initial surprise, including those who had supported him in the past. On hearing that he planned to run for president, Susan Saum-Wicklein, the manager of his 1992 Senate campaign, said incredulously, “He’s doing what?” Saum-Wicklein, a former chairman of the Maryland Republican Party, added, “I think this shows that in the United States of America, anyone can run for president.”
Keyes ran, but not necessarily gracefully. In the summer of 1995, Rocker, who had joined the campaign as its finance director, had an ugly falling out with the man he’d urged to enter the race. In June he quit the campaign, accusing Keyes of running merely to raise his profile so he could command higher speaking fees. The Keyes campaign countercharged that Rocker was the source of “serious, still-unresolved discrepancies in the finances” of the campaign and that some $58,000 was unaccounted for. Rocker denied the charges. Then he refused to turn his files over to the campaign. Then he sued Keyes, claiming he was owed $30,000 in back pay and expenses.
The lawsuit was resolved out of court; neither party would discuss the terms of the settlement, although Rocker told the Center that he was unhappy with the amount of money he received. “Surely it wasn’t what I asked for,” he said, “but the lawyer just went ahead [and settled].”
Michael Tarone, who represented Keyes in the lawsuit and still represents the presidential hopeful’s campaign committee, dismissed the Rocker story. “It was settled way back,” he told the Center. “It’s old news.”
While Rocker and Keyes’ campaign staff were issuing charges and countercharges in the summer of 1995, The Baltimore Sun obtained internal memos suggesting that Keyes was again getting paid by his campaign, albeit indirectly. In a memo dated June 28, 1995, George F. Lynch, Jr., the campaign’s accountant, warned that there was a “possible commingling of personal and campaign monies . . . If the situation which has been reported is not remedied immediately, all of the other efforts to elect Alan Keyes for president could be in jeopardy.”
In a memo written a week earlier, Tarone had urged Keyes to “erect a Chinese Wall between the run for office and your other life.”
Keyes raised money at churches, not for his campaign, but for his personal living expenses. His campaign staff arranged for his personal speaking appearances, from which he also derived an income. And he allegedly used campaign contributions to pay for a limousine to drive him to and from WCBM-AM, the Baltimore station that aired his call-in radio show.
Keyes was unapologetic. “The distinction between the campaign and my personal life is an absurd distinction,” he told The Baltimore Sun, “because I’ve got no personal life and haven’t had one for months.”
Dan Godzich, who’s managing Keyes’ 2000 presidential campaign, called the idea that Keyes is running for his personal enrichment laughable. “To tell you the truth, every time Alan runs for office he hurts himself financially very badly,” Godzich told the Center. “It’s a big sacrifice for his family. He doesn’t come from a wealthy background, so he doesn’t have the resources of many of the people running. He’s certainly not a Forbes. A lot of people don’t realize that John McCain is worth about $80 million through his marriage. And on top of that he’s getting a Senate salary anyway. For Alan, it’s a big sacrifice.”
Compared with the other candidates, Keyes is a man of relatively modest means, although his income, well into six figures, is far more than that of a middle-class American. He owns a house in suburban Maryland that he purchased in 1989 for $490,000. As of this writing, Keyes had yet to file the required financial disclosure form listing his assets and income with the Federal Election Commission, so it is unclear how much he earned in 1998 or how much he is worth. In his 1996 bid, Keyes filed an incomplete disclosure form several months late and after repeated requests from the FEC for the information. In his 1992 Senate race he disclosed that in 1991 his income was $300,000.
A look at Keyes’ individual campaign donors does not reveal any well-known fat cats or scions of traditional American wealth. Among his most notable contributors: entertainer Pat Boone, foreign-policy experts Jeane Kirkpatrick and Constantine Menges (a former official of the National Security Council), and conservative intellectuals Allan Bloom, Irving Kristol, and Paul Weyrich. Keyes has connections in the Republican intelligentsia, but the economic elite has not been supportive.
“Right now we’re right around 40,000 donors,” Godzich said of Keyes’s fundraising efforts. “Our average donation is around $25. I think total we’ve maybe gotten one or two PAC donations. And one of them was from the Kansas Republican Assembly. He went and spoke for their group and they were so appreciative that they voted on sending us like a $300 check or something. I remember when that came in the mail we all were at the office and said, ‘We got a PAC check? Oh, I feel so tainted.’”
The National Rifle Association, which hasn’t given a dime to Keyes since his 1992 Senate campaign, is nonetheless his No. 1 career patron, mostly because of an independent expenditure for communications it made on his behalf back then. 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 NRA. In Keyes’s 1992 race, however, the NRA came through for him. The NRA gave him $7,306 and made another $14,903 in independent communications expenditures, making it far and away Keyes’s top giver.
No other PAC has made significant contributions to Keyes. The National Right to Life PAC rewarded 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 give money to a politician, they assume the favor will be returned in some way. Keyes has simply not been in a position to return any such favors.
Godzich acknowledges this. “I think that’s one of the reasons why we don’t get the big-money people,” he told the Center, “because the big money people want some kind of quid pro quo. He’ll say, ‘If you want to give me a check, that’s fine, but don’t expect anything.’”
And that, in a nutshell, sums up Keyes’ long-shot presidential campaign. With almost no prospect of being in a position of having quos to sell for quids, Keyes has been ignored by those who do expect something for their money.
Top Ten Career Patrons
$22,209
$12,263
$11,500
$7,137
$6,000
$6,000
$6,000
$5,980
$5,950
$5,000
$5,000
$5,000
$5,000
This list is based on individual and PAC contributions to Keyes’ Senate campaigns from 1987-1998; individual and PAC contributions to Keyes’s 1996 presidential campaign; individual and PAC contributions to the Campaign for Maryland’s Future; and individual and PAC contributions to Keyes’s 2000 presidential campaign through June 30, 1999. Independent expenditures are also included, where appropriate.
Sources: Federal Election Commission, Center for Responsive Politics.
1. This figure is primarily independent expenditures.
2. Includes contributions from the National Right to Life PAC, the Right to Life of Maryland PAC, and the New Jersey Right to Life PAC. State chapters are affiliated with the national organization, but the FEC has ruled that their PACs are not coordinated or affiliated in any way. Includes independent expenditures.
4. This figure is entirely independent expenditures.
8. This figure is entirely independent expenditures.
Books
The Buying of the President 2004
- Introduction
- Equal Rights, Unequal Protection
- Private Parties
- George W. Bush - The Texas Years
- George W. Bush - The War President
- George W. Bush - The Administration
- Wesley Clark
- Howard Dean
- John Edwards
- Richard Gephardt
- Bob Graham
- John Kerry
- Dennis Kucinich
- Joe Lieberman
- Carol Moseley Braun
- Al Sharpton
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
The Buying of the President 2000
