Monday, May 12, 2008
The two favorites fillabluster as Keyes steals the show.
Feb 16, 2000 | You begin to wonder about your sanity when Alan Keyes starts making sense.
You wonder if you're just spending too much time around politicians like Gov. George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain, relatively decent men who -- as the mightily important South Carolina primary approaches -- find their blood increasingly bubbling with hunger and oil. It gets into their speech and infiltrates their brains, so that you hear them contradicting themselves and things they said just days -- or was it moments? -- before.
They snipe and snip and spit and froth, and you start to read between the lines of even the most innocuous of statements and suspect that nothing is an accident -- no joke, no chuckle, no curled lip or furrowed brow.
Did McCain mean to say he would go to Bob Jones University and berate its racist interracial-dating policy when just the other day he said he would never, ever go there? Does it matter? Did Bush mean to tar McCain with a brush slathered in pink paint by alleging (erroneously) that a gay Republican organization had endorsed him? Are McCain staffers handing out negative leaflets about Bush despite their candidate's public admonition not to do so? When Bush said that his "ZIP code is Austin, Texas," was he aware that "Austin, Texas" is not actually a ZIP code?
And then you start to wonder that maybe it's you -- maybe you're the one with the problem. You're looking too closely at the nonsense and not enough at the substance. And then you have a conversation with a media critic of a media critic who hosts a cable TV round-table with a cast of media critics and everyone agrees that the voters like the nonsense, they love the nonsense, they need the nonsense. And then James Fallows and Bernie Kalb and the late Fred Friendly appear before you in a post-debate hallucination and berate you for becoming one of "them." And everything inside you says you must flee the bubble, if for no other reason than because Keyes -- stolid, consistent, brilliant, unafraid of losing because his loss is already a foregone conclusion -- is starting to seem like the sanest man in the room.
But before you can, you have to write this South Carolina debate story.
The field of GOP candidates has been winnowed since the last GOP debate, so only Keyes, Bush and McCain sat with CNN's Larry King in Seawell's Banquet Center for the South Carolina Business & Industry Political Education Committee (BIPEC) presidential debate Tuesday night. Bush was forceful, if snippy and vague. McCain was statesmanlike, if wobbly and occasionally off.
And Keyes? Well, Keyes, according to 46 South Carolina Republican primary voters assembled by the interactive research firm SpeakOut.com, clearly won the debate. Using a hand-held device gauged from 1 to 100, Keyes scored the highest ratings of the night when he easily rose above McCain and Bush midsquabble and berated them for sinking in the mud. (Interestingly, Keyes replicated his score once again when taking African-American criminals to task for introducing the concept of racial profiling to modern law enforcement.)
Bush and McCain, conversely, were mired in arguments about who went negative against whom when, whose comparison of the other to Clinton or Gore was meanest and who first broke a pledge not to go negative. The Arizona senator and the Texas governor exuded bitterness, ill will, sleep deprivation and a deep and abiding lust not to lose in this all-important primary state. In a way, it was an honest representation of the ugly campaign that quickly emerged here after McCain's startling 19-point win in the New Hampshire primary on Feb. 1.
After New Hampshire, McCain and Bush were neck and neck in the polls here, but the hardscrabble politics of South Carolina have wreaked havoc on the insurgent. Bush pulled ahead of McCain 49 percent to 42 percent, with Keyes drawing 5 percent, according to a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll taken Friday through Sunday.
Thus a lot was at stake, and it was in the hands of Larry King.
Get Salon in your mailbox!