Alan Keyes Is Running for President

Conservative e-rag WorldNetDaily broke the news this morning that Alan Keyes, best known for running two unsuccessful presidential campaigns, is running for President again this year:

Keyes told syndicated radio host Janet Parshall he’s “unmoved” by the lack of moral courage shown by the other candidates, among whom he sees no standout who articulates the “key kernel of truth that must, with courage, be presented to our people.”

He added, “The one thing I’ve always been called to do is to raise the standard … of our allegiance to God and His authority that has been the foundation stone of our nation’s life” – and he decried the lack of “forthright, clear, and clarion declaration” from the current crop of presidential contenders.

Keyes isn’t going to win, and I’d be surprised if he made much of an impact on the Republican presidential race at all. In fact, I think Keyes is going to have more of an impact on the Democratic side.

Sen. Barack Obama won his 2004 Senate race against Keyes, who was shipped in by Illinois Republicans after their old candidate, Jack Ryan, was forced to withdraw when divorce records revealed his sexual history as a swinger. There’s one way that Keyes’s candidacy works to Obama’s advantage, and there’s one way that it doesn’t:

It works to Obama’s advantage if all Democrats hear about Keyes is how far out of the mainstream his proposals are. He’s pretty right-wing, and Democrats will be happy that Obama beat him. Seeing him again will remind people that (1) Obama can win an election, and (2) Obama doesn’t have to be the only Black person in the race to win; he isn’t just a “Black candidate.”

It works to Obama’s disadvantage if Democrats give Keyes a closer look, realizing that he was a dead fish in Obama’s 2004 Senate race to begin with. The truth is that after Ryan dropped out of the race, Obama became the frontrunner, and he remained frontrunner through election day. He did not have a challenging race for his seat against Keyes’s overt carpetbagging, and if people realize that, they may not think Obama has had a hard enough campaign to prepare him to be the Democratic nominee.

If nothing else, though, Keyes will make the race interesting. He’ll be in Monday’s “Values Voter” debate, cementing himself firmly in the tier in which he belongs, alongside Duncan Hunter, Mike Huckabee, Tom Tancredo, Sam Brownback, and John Cox. (Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Fred Thompson declined invitations to attend.)