Prof. Michael Baranowski, writing from the University of Evansville in Indiana, asks my opinion of Alan Keyes, who he thinks is "the best speaker of the bunch" in the current presidential sweepstakes. Keyes is, in his view, "perhaps one of the few candidates who may actually have a core belief other than political survival (which is clearly not all that important to him -- or to Gary Bauer, for that matter)." As an epigraph Prof. Baranowski adds an amusing aphorism from Napoleon Bonaparte, which says a lot about current American politics: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."

Amardeep Singh in Durham, N.C., also asks about Keyes. Describing himself as "basically a pro-choice, queer-friendly lefty who disagrees with his entire program," Singh says that he at first was "simply interested to see an African-American man in the Republican race, bringing in fringe conservative votes with his mad loquaciousness."

Keyes' revelation at the Feb. 15 CNN-sponsored debate that he's Catholic "makes him even more exotic, since African-American religion is usually so strongly marked as Baptist." Singh wonders if this doesn't make Keyes in effect "Italian" -- that is to say, "dangerously loquacious, passionate and massively in excess of the parched Protestant landscape of the 2000 elections": "Keyes is weird, fringy, and often loony, but at least he's not in denial."

My judgment about Alan Keyes somewhat parallels what I've said about John McCain: It's very dangerous to raise loners to the presidency, which requires complexities of teamwork, persuasion, consensus-building and compromise. Keyes is obviously highly intelligent and endlessly energetic. He has all the bratty baby-boom Harvard College articulateness that the back-slapping, Secret Society, old-style "white shoe" Yalie George W. Bush lacks.

But like Steve Forbes, Keyes has spent far too little time thinking about the president's job as an administrator or commander in chief. Keyes seems to be running for chairman of the campus debate team. His often snide and disruptive behavior at the CNN event also won him no points with me. Keyes would make an outstanding college teacher or host of an ideas-and-issues TV talk show, but I fail to see that he has a shred of political talent. And his escalating charges of racism against the press and electorate are simply cheap hysteria.

In the three weeks since my last column, Hillary Rodham Clinton has been up hill and down dale, beating the bushes in upstate New York to try to convince someone somewhere that she is a woman of substance rather than a raisin-eyed, carrot-nosed, twig-armed, straw-stuffed mannequin trundled in on a go-cart by the mentally bereft powerbrokers of the state Democratic Party.

It's been a diverting few months for us charter members of Hillary Watch, but I couldn't be bothered to turn the TV on for her poorly scheduled and overlong Feb. 6 announcement extravaganza: There are far better things to do with two hours on a Sunday afternoon. Typical of Hillary's gang-that-couldn't-shoot-straight campaign, the big news that trickled out of that cumbersome event was: the playing of a masturbatory Billy Joel song beforehand; the castrated silence of the onstage president; the lopping of the telltale Clinton name off the Hillary banner; and the flaunting of salads and omelettes during the sugar-on-sugar video.

Those eggs hit the fan two days later as Hillary and her aides managed to forget to tip the waitress in a diner in Albumen -- sorry, Albion, N.Y., where the male owner comped the first lady her two caloric plates in a row of scrambled eggs and home fries. Big deal, one might have said, had Hillary or her campaign staff quickly rectified the oversight.

But when a reporter asked about it a day later, Hillary's first impulse as always was to stonewall, calling it a "wild story." Deny, deny, deny: Here in nuce -- or should we say in ovo -- is how this country got dragged into the impeachment crisis. It was Hillary's refusal to settle with Paula Jones, as well as the defamatory attacks on Jones and other complaining women that Hillary countenanced, that led to the unearthing of Monica Lewinsky in the multi-volume Clinton Casanova Chronicles.

Ten days later, after rising publicity and a conservative Web-driven stunt producing a flood of dollar bills from around the country for the stiffed waitress, Hillary's spokesman announced that a $100 savings bond was in the mail for the waitress's son. The whole episode was a classic Marie Antoinette Moment: Hillary managed to show that far from being the champion of working women as she claims, she is so used to being treated like royalty that she is now smugly removed from practical reality.

Recent Stories