The American Spectator

Things aren’t working out well for Alan Keyes. The perennial candidate with a worse electoral track record than Harold Stassen spent most of his adult lifetime in the Republican Party. He lasted in the Constitution Party for less than two weeks. After his defeat at the hands of relatively unknown members of a small third party, Keyes the pro-life stalwart analogized his political career to an abortion.

On entering the race, Keyes was the biggest-name presidential candidate the Constitution Party had ever attracted. But he disagreed with the paleoconservative party’s positions on the Iraq war and foreign policy more generally. Keyes’s supporters tried to modify the platform and were overwhelmingly defeated. Shortly afterward, so was Keyes himself.

Chuck Baldwin — a preacher, radio show host, and columnist who actually agreed with the Constitution Party’s platform on the issues in question — beat Keyes 3-to-1, a margin worthy of Barack Obama or Barbara Mikulski. Paleocons praised the Constitutionalists for sticking to their principles, which they did, but Keyes’s odd notions about how to win friends and influence people also contributed to his drubbing.

Many activists wanted Keyes to play some role in the Constitution Party but had misgivings about making him the nominee. He managed to alienate members of this group by offending them in conference calls and refusing to consider the vice presidential slot, which ended up going to Darrell Castle. “It would have been best for Alan to take a cue from the Bible,” said Georgia state chairman Ricardo Davis. “When you come into the room, don’t go for the nice chair in the front given to those who are honored lest you be told to get up and get to the back pew. It is better to come in the room and take the back pew and have someone say ‘Alan, come and take the seat of honor.’”

p>Keyes wasn’t exactly magnanimous in defeat, either. He said that the party whose nomination he sought was “governed by a spirit of dictatorship and despotism.” In the same interview , Keyes protested that he had been invited into the Constitution Party and then likened himself to a fetus being aborted in the womb: br> /p>

In the act of procreation, people are joyfully, ecstatically, with great joy in every fiber of their being, saying “yes” to the coming of that new life. And then in abortion, they kill it. So what, in fact, my political career is, is the paradigm and pattern of that which I am trying to stop for the child. I kind of represent, in political terms, the abortion. You’re invited in, then they kill you. You’re invited in, then they kill you.

br> Debates about whether Keyes was shafted by Howard Phillips and the Constitution Party will rage on among third-party aficionados for years, like the arguments between those who say Pat Buchanan took over the Reform Party in 2000 and the brigade members who maintain he was robbed by Ross Perot. (Though at least Buchanan actually