A few months ago I got on an elevator in the Dirksen Senate Office Building with retiring GOP Senator Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois, the man whose decision not to seek re-election set off what has been one of the weirdest election contests in recent memory. Lamenting the lack of diversity in his party, and what that portends for its future success, Fitzgerald summed up his concerns this way: "You know what the problem is with the Republican Party? Not enough white people."
His clear implication was that the demographics were trending against Republicans, and that something had to be done to attract more voters of color to the GOP banner. It is the kind of talk that got him in trouble with GOP leaders at home, some of whom threatened to challenge him in a primary if he sought re-election. He did not.
And the follies began. First, a black guy no one ever heard of named Barack Obama surged to a primary victory win when the deep-pocketed front-runner self-destructed after allegations that he hit his wife and may have threatened to kill her. Then the GOP nominee, Jack Ryan, withdrew after divorce records showed that he was accused of inappropriately propositioning a woman for sex in a sex club. That the woman happened to be his wife at the time seemed to carry no mitigating effect, even though she supported his candidacy and his efforts to keep the divorce records sealed. Party leaders felt betrayed, abandoned Ryan, and began the search for a replacement.
Then, in the latest of the odd twists, the Illinois GOP settled on a candidate it hopes will replace Fitzgerald, one who seems to answer the senator's diversity concerns. Would that were the reason, however. Alan Keyes is black and talks about it in a prodigiously American kind of a way. He is deeply conservative and explosively articulate.
On why, for example, he opposes affirmative action: "We are not supposed to be judged based on what our ancestors did or suffered. We are supposed to be judged as individuals, based on what we are able to achieve. And when you tell me that somebody's skin color or gender is going to determine their prospects in this world, that is turning the clock back hundreds of years, back to a time before this nation declared that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator; not by their ancestry, not by their skin color, not by their gender, not by Congress, not by the Constitution, and not by the laws."
There are downsides, of course. Some people think he's crazy. He lives in Maryland, not Illinois, and he's running against the once obscure Obama, who, for now, is blazing across the political heavens, trailing many a lesser star in his wake. The first poll after Keyes got into the race showed him trailing Obama by 39 points, 67 to 28, and it has been reasonably asked why would he do something like this.
A more important question, I think, is what would lead the Illinois GOP to do something like this? This is not a party organization unaccustomed to producing political talent. Start with Abraham Lincoln and end with the current house speaker, Dennis Hastert. But in between add former Speaker Joe Cannon and former Minority Leader Everett Dirksen.
A Chicago Sun-Times columnist, who is as expert on Illinois politics as anyone alive, has an answer. "The Keyes candidacy is an absurd development, but one I can explain," Lynn Sweet wrote recently. "The real reason Keyes is being imported to Illinois is to help the state GOP wrest control of the Illinois General Assembly from the Democrats. Keyes, a red-meat conservative, was embraced by the 19-member state central committee charged with finding a Ryan replacement. The panel is dominated by conservatives."
A reasonable explanation that has the added advantage of likely being true, but from a distance, it is the absurdity that is most striking. How is it possible that a party that controlled the governor's office for 30 years until 2002 is not be able to find a homegrown candidate? How is it possible that Hastert, the man sitting two heartbeats away from the presidency, cannot find a suitable Illinois Republican to run for the Senate?
"I've been working for five weeks trying to find a candidate," Hastert told Tim Russert on Meet The Press.
When pressed on the idea that the party went out of state to find a black candidate to put up against Obama, the speaker demurred. "Well," he said, "I tell you what: I was out of town when that happened."
But just as there are enough real, proud, unabashed liberals in Illinois to easily explain the emergence of Obama, there are enough Republicans as to render the Keyes pick mind-boggling. And even as the state continues to trend Democratic, Republicans continue to hold a slight edge in congressional delegation, 11 to 10. And still they need Keyes?
Some of this may have to do with the party's troubles going back to the last Republican governor, George Ryan, who is currently under indictment on racketeering, fraud, and conspiracy charges. But the party resembles nothing so much as a sick patient in the midst of a violent bout of organ rejection.
Mark Twain once described Chicago as a place where people were constantly "contriving and achieving new impossibilities." When members of the Republican State Central Committee met at the Union League Club in The Loop last week and picked Keyes, they may have done it again.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the online edition of The American Prospect.
