Less than a week into the race between Barack Obama and Alan
Keyes for Illinois’s open Senate seat, the winner is already
clear.
It’s the media by a landslide.
What a fascinating race they (okay, we) now have to watch. Two
intelligent and articulate black candidates who both — Keyes in
particular — provide usable copy almost every time they speak. In
a special twist, Keyes appropriates the rhetorical notes of the
black left to his own deeply conservative ends, accusing Obama of
holding “the slaveholder’s position” on abortion. Obama, on the
other hand, while substantively quite liberal, almost never makes a
19th-century allusion like that, instead sticking to the sort of
unifying notes we heard in his “One America” speech at the
Democratic National Convention; he didn’t make the deep inroads
into a mostly-white electorate that he has by sounding like Al
Sharpton (last seen in Boston demanding his 40 acres and a
mule).
It isn’t shaping up as an exciting horserace, alas. Illinois is
barren ground for a passionate pro-lifer like Keyes; the suburbs of
Chicago, where elections in Illinois are swung one way or the
other, tend to elect pro-choice Republicans like Reps. Judy Biggert
and Mark Kirk (the latter even voted against a partial-birth
abortion ban). An excited cohort of pro-life voters? With all due
respect to Hunter
Baker, we’re talking about a state where that and a
buck-seventy-five will get you a ride home on the El, after you
watch your disastrous election night returns come in. (The effects
on the presidential race are irrelevant; Bush isn’t going to win
Illinois.)
Add in the carpetbag factor — and Marylander Keyes’s hypocrisy
on the subject, having berated Hillary Clinton for doing the same
thing and said as recently last week that he’s against
carpetbagging in principle — and Keyes faces insurmountable odds.
Early polling
shows Keyes with 28% support against Obama’s 67% among registered
voters. Even amongst rural voters, where Keyes should find his
natural base, Obama leads 57-39 (though it should be noted that,
given the small size of the subpopulation, this is statistically
less meaningful than it sounds.)
Mike Murphy, who clearly has an axe to grind,
overestimates the damage that Keyes’s candidacy can do an
Illinois GOP that wasn’t exactly a thriving institution before
Keyes arrived. First came the scandal plagued debacle that was
Governor George Ryan’s tenure. (Perhaps Ryan commuted the sentences
of every single inmate on death row out of sympathy for his fellow
criminals.) Then came 2002, a great year for Republicans elsewhere
but not so much in Illinois: Jim Ryan — unrelated to George but
tainted by the perception of corruption in the Springfield
Republican establishment — was defeated by Rod Blagojevich,
Illinois’s first Democratic governor in decades, who brought with
him Democratic majorities in both houses of the state legislature.
Then came another unrelated Ryan, Jack, whose candidacy went up in
smoke after embarrassing details of his divorce became public. The
decision to court Keyes may be a mistake, but after what they’ve
been through it’s unlikely Illinois Republicans are sweating it too
much.
The local media are clearly relishing it, though. Both the
Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune gave
major play yesterday to Keyes’s demand for a full schedule of the
six debates that Obama had proposed against Ryan, rather than the
three that Obama now favors. It’s a sensible strategy for a
frontrunner — why take the risk of too many public confrontations
when you can coast to victory? — but its one he’s having some
trouble getting away with. Reporters, of course, would
love to see more debates — more fun stuff to write about!
— and their questions about the debate schedule started to get on
Obama’s nerves the other day. “”You know, come on,” he said to a
reporter, according to the Sun-Times. “You’ve already had
fun. You got one headline out of it today.”
Ah, but newspapers need headlines every day.
