The men who would be king

Forbes joined Keyes, Christian activist Gary Bauer, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch and Arizona Sen. John McCain to take audience questions, as funneled through CNN's Judy Woodruff and Manchester's WMUR-TV's Tom Griffith.

Conventional wisdom would have it that this was an important event for McCain, as he's rising in the New Hampshire polls -- 28 percent to Bush's 41 percent, 21 percent to Bush's 39 percent, or 26 percent to Bush's 42 percent, depending upon your preference in pollsters. McCain is here and fighting hard; he unveiled a biographical ad this week and held a press conference Wednesday re-introducing his plan to fund an experimental school voucher program targeted at the poorest communities and funded by closing government subsidies on ethanol, sugar, oil and gas.

So all eyes were on McCain, and he handled himself just fine. He drove home the point that real reform -- whether in health care, education or taxes -- is "not possible when average Americans are no longer represented in Washington, D.C.," usurped, as they are, by "the special interests" McCain promised to "fight 'til the last breath I draw."

But none of the candidates, including McCain, were really able to get across their raison d'etres, restricted as they were to brevity.

Hatch -- a decent, upright man whose ill-conceived campaign should soon replace the Loch Ness monster as one of Time/Life's new "mysteries of the world" volumes -- boasted that he had "more experience than anyone running -- including the two Democrats."

Bauer projected himself as a reasonable-seeming, bureaucrat-hating moralist trying to challenge Forbes for the conservative Christian vote. He went after the Forbes tax plan for providing a "major new write-off for big business," and tried to figure out his position on Most Favored Nation status for China.

Forbes, from the Disneyland Hall of CEOs -- still unblinking and unflinching, precise and fastidious -- was a tad more relaxed, even to the point of telling few (quite good) jokes. He stayed on message, of course, and offered a compelling answer on HMO reform by telling the audience about the Forbes Inc. health care policy introduced earlier this decade. Giving each worker $1,500 to cover routine medical expenses, the Forbes policy declared: "You are in charge. If you want to buy into an HMO, you can. If you want fee-for-service you can." The policy empowered individuals, Forbes said. "Consumerism works."

And Keyes? In addition to being the most frightening man on stage, partly because he was probably the smartest of the lot, Keyes was easily the most outspoken.

For example, when Forbes was asked whether he would hire or fire someone who was openly gay, he answered that he would "hire people who are qualified for the job, people who can do the work at hand, people who are there to get something done -- not to make a political statement about a lifestyle."

"Homosexuality is an abomination," Keyes stated in answer to the same question.

A tall dude in a leather jacket asked McCain about the hypocrisy of marijuana being illegal while alcohol isn't. "Thank you, that is an excellent question, which I would prefer to duck," McCain said before jokingly recalling a question about the legalization of hemp that he'd taken -- but misunderstood -- earlier in the campaign. He then disagreed with the questioner's belief that marijuana wasn't harmful, agreed that liquor is and went right into the impossibility of health care reform -- which led him back to ... campaign finance reform.

Keyes has a different prism, of course. "We're not dealing with a material problem," he said in response to a question about the war on drugs; "We're dealing with a moral problem ... The fundamental discipline prevailing in society when I was born has broken down."

Keyes addressed every question from the mindset that the United States is in the midst of "the worst moral crisis we've ever faced, and we must address it or we're going to lose our liberty."

If you agree, and you don't mind the hectoring, then God bless. But regardless of my irredeemably secular and amoral worldview, it seems more than possible from the frothing tenor of Keyes' outrage alone -- not to mention the peculiar causes that merit his proselytizing, like "getting rid of the socialist income tax" -- that he is in serious need of some medication.

Next Page: The stiff becomes a clown

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