SINCE BEING REJECTED FOR THE REPUBLICAN AND CONSTITUTION PARTY PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATIONS, perennial candidate Alan Keyes is now attempting to inflict himself upon the American Independent Party. A high-decibel Harold Stassen, the Energizer Loser keeps running, and running, and running… Predictably, he failed in the democratic contest for this one-state party’s byline, but his supporters are attempting to force him onto the ballot, anyway.   

For those who hadn’t noticed Keyes’ latest presidential campaigns (or perhaps his perpetual campaign, spilling over leap-years), Keyes ran unsuccessfully for Senate in Maryland twice (1988 and 1992), then for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996. When his low poll numbers excluded him from a debate, Keyes went on a hunger strike and was handcuffed for chaining himself to a TV station. In 2000, he ran again for president, garnering third place in Iowa. After pulling out, he launched a “citizens” effort to draft himself as President Bush’s running mate. In 2004, he hopped across the state to run for U.S. Senate in Illinois against a rising star named Barack Obama. During that race, Keyes supported exempting all black Americans from taxation for a generation or more, as a form of slavery reparations. Then he drafted himself into the 2008 presidential race, later claiming a swell of “grassroots” support in the Iowa Straw Poll, where he failed to receive a single vote. Long after serious candidates who had some reasonable grounds for running – like governors Tommy Thompson and Jim Gilmore – had pulled out, Keyes browbeat his moderator for insufficient attention.

When we heard of Keyes’ entry into the ’08 race last October, we wrote:

Keyes’ performance in the [Republican] debates could have a powerful impact on the presidential nomination – of the Constitution Party. If a moderate is nominated, look for an independent banner on Keyes’ website that reads, “We Need Alan Keyes to Run Third Party!”

Sure enough, Keyes’ website now proclaims, “Independent Alan Keyes for President.”

The Ambassador left the Republican Party in mid-April, just one week before the Constitution Party’s National Convention in Kansas City. According to party officials, CP party founder Howard Phillips asked Keyes not to run for the nomination, as he did not represent the party’s ideology. Phillips put his mouth where is money was. Although Phillips once called Keyes “a man I admire profoundly,” Phillips denounced Keyes as “a Neocon” who believes in multiple positions not shared by the Constitution Party, such as continuing membership in the UN, NATO, and the IMF; U.S. foreign aid – and criticizing Ron Paul’s extremist Iraq position. Carrying water for Ron Paul, Phillips declaimed:

If the Paul people are to support anyone, it is Chuck Baldwin they should be supporting, and that is something we can look to. Ron Paul has attracted scores of thousands of supporters and he’s got an estimated $35 million in the bank. [T]hose supporters and those resources can become an asset to this party if we nominate a candidate who has been a friend of Ron Paul, not an enemy of Ron Paul.

Alan Keyes was soon crushed in his bid for the CP nomination by Chuck Baldwin, a Florida minister and the party’s 2004 vice presidential nominee, who won by a final vote total of 383.8-125.7. (We don’t know which delegates counted as eight-tenths of a man for Baldwin, nor seven-tenths for Keyes, but the CP is composed of Originalists….) He graciously refused to endorse Baldwin, grousing that he had been betrayed yet again:

It seems that the pattern of my political career…I have experienced this pattern on several occasions in the course of my political life, where people invite me in, and then they kill me, they invite me in, and then they kill me, they invite me in and then they kill me…I kind of represent, in political terms, the abortion.

One of the delegations Keyes’ carried in the CP convention was its California state affiliate, the American Independent Party. The AIP announced late last month it switched its “affiliation nationally with the newly-formed America’s Independent Party of Fenton, MI.” (You can visit the A’sIP website here.)

Just over a week ago, the AIP nominated Alan Keyes for president.

Apeing the AIP

The trouble is, according to party members, no national affiliation change has occurred, and the AIP presidential candidate for 2008 will be Chuck Baldwin, not Alan Keyes.

According to them, the party has been hijacked by its former chair, Ed Noonan. They say they deposed Noonan in late June and nominated Chuck Baldwin. Reports state Noonan and a handful of others met online and nominated Keyes. There are also irregularities with the official party website. The URL is www.aipca.org. However, that site currently redirects all viewers to www.aip-ca.com, a website run by Ed Noonan. The Jim King-wing of the party opened atemporary website on blogspot.

It appears not only did Alan Keyes noisily elbow his way into the 1996, 2000, and 2008 GOP presidential elections – crying “racism” whenever he failed to receive glowing coverage – but he was also rejected by the Constitution Party and the American Independent Party of California in favor of a Florida minister.

Keyes, whose entire career has been based upon exploiting conservative white guilt – after all, what has he done to deserve to be considered a presidential candidate of any party? – is now running fourth party. And if true, his supporters are trying to hijack the nominating process.

The AIP is the third largest party in California, not because any of its members believes in its platform, but because voters are automatically enrolled in the AIP if they say they want to register “independent.” The confusion is so rampant that San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom’s fiancée, Jennifer Siebel, registered with the ultra-conservative AIP. A full two percent of California voters registered with the AIP, likely with the same confusion.

The late William K. Shearer founded the AIP to advance George Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign. The AIP nominated John G. Schmitz (a John Birch Society conservative and the father of teacher-predator Mary Kay Letourneau); in 1976, the AIP nod went to Georgia’s segregationist Governor Lester Maddox; in 1980, to former Louisiana Congressman and segregationist John Rarick. The following cycle, the AIP formally aligned itself with the Populist Party run by The SPOTLIGHT’s Willis Carto. But when the Populists nominated David Duke in 1988, it was a move even the AIP could not stomach, casting its lot with Howard Phillips’ Constitution Party (then known as the U.S. Taxpayers Party) in 1992.

Until the state weighs in on the intraparty dispute, Keyes’ vice president is Wiley Drake, a Southern Baptist pastor and radio announcer in Buena Vista, CA. As Second Vice President of the Southern Baptist Convention, Drake endorsed a candidate for U.S. Senate on official letterhead. His bid for presidency of the SBC this June garnered less than one percent of the voting delegates. When Americans United for Separation of Church and State looked askance at his political endorsements, Drake asked his followers to unleash “Imprecatory Prayer” – prayer for the destruction or death of his enemies. Among his suggested prayers was Psalm 109, which states, “let Satan stand at his right hand…Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow. Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places… neither let there be any to favor his fatherless children. Let his posterity be cut off: and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.”

Quite a pro-life ticket he and Keyes make.