Hmm.
You know, the loon has a point. Of a sort.
BLOOMINGTON -- Political polls are "phony" and should not just be disregarded, but banned, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Alan Keyes argued Monday. "They (polls) are manipulative and degrading and damaging to our political system, and they should not be allowed when it comes to the actual time frame in which people are making up their minds," Keyes said during a meeting with The Pantagraph's editorial board.
His comments came in response to questions about a Pantagraph/St. Louis Post-Dispatch poll published Monday showing him trailing Democrat Barack Obama 68 percent to 23 percent. The survey, released 43 days before the election, indicates many Illinoisans may be troubled by the fact that the conservative former presidential candidate is from Maryland and that he has locked horns with some members of his own party over his conservative beliefs.
Here's the thing: I actually agree with him that polls should be banned. Perhaps in the post-convention period, no polling should be published, and no exit polls should be allowed. They do give the impression that a race may be decided long before it actually is.
That said ... polls or no polls, the man has been coming off as a barking loon. The words out of his very own mouth are contributing to the fact that people just don't want to vote for him; the fact that he's from out-of-state is, at this point, just the lagniappe.
The problem with Illinois Republicans at the moment is that they just don't know what to do with themselves. Essentially, the party as a whole is comparatively centrist. (Compared to, say, Kansas, which has a dominant Republican party that is pretty much Keyes-loony from top to bottom.) However, they've been getting pounded for more than five years now by the licenses-for-bribes scandal, in which the federal government has charged former governor George Ryan with racketeering, of all things. And people around Ryan keep getting charged and convicted and rolling over on the guy, so that the scandal is never far from people's minds. Then you get the Jack Ryan scandal, which was nice and juicy and terribly sordid (although at least he didn't do anything against the law). Additionally, the conservative movement is powerful in the party hierarchy, if not particularly in the party itself. Thus, you wind up with people who think, "Hey, let's pull in Alan Keyes! He's black, which neutralizes that issue; and he's incredibly conservative!" They didn't count on the fact that he was, in fact, so conservative that he would alienate the party hierarchy itself, never mind rank-and-file Republicans. And the radical right would never have touched him, conservative or not.
If nothing else, this particular fiasco may hobble the conservative wing of the Illinois GOP for some time to come.
Posted by iain at September 21, 2004 10:46 AM
