Alan Keyes
January 7, 1996

Good evening. It seems like every year I come here, I have to correct the record. I come from Maryland, I live in Maryland, I stay in Maryland. Interesting. And actually whether I'll get home to Maryland or not is a big question!

Good evening. It's good to be back here. I felt partly like making a progress report after last year, and I think we should note certain instances of progress, meaning no particular offense to anybody, but the line up has changed a little bit. Have you notice that?

And one of the things that I noticed about the line up, contrary to what some of the pundits and others had predicted in the course of last year, I noticed that all the folks who stand up and unequivocally believe that this party has to remain committed to its strong commitment to dealing with the moral crisis and standing up on behalf of the life of the unborn--we're all still in here going strong. I notice that those who stood up here last year and told us that we had to take that plank out of the Republican Party platform--I think the reaction of Republicans all over this country has already taken them out of this presidential race, and I'm glad to see it.

We've also managed to make some progress in other respects. I was really pleased last night when I put the question to Senator Gramm as to whether or not he would favor overturning Roe v. Wade, and without a moment's hesitation, he said he would. And I thought that that was a remarkable improvement over his answer last year on Meet The Press, where he said, "I don't believe there is a consensus in the country to amend the Constitution. Nobody has offered the amendment. I would not see that as part of my mandate in terms of amending the Constitution"--and so forth. And when asked in a news interview whether he'd overturn Roe v. Wade he said he didn't think he would pursue that!

I am so glad. You see, here is a guy who tells you all the time the number of grades that he was not able to get through when he was a student--and we all know, given his record and so forth, is that in intervening years he has become remarkably educable. And I am glad to see that, too. And of course we have others not so willing to address the issues, and I've got to say as everyone says, the folks who are in this race are remarkable men who have a lot to offer the country.

But you know, we aren't electing a President to have a beauty contest of remarkable people. It's not a matter of competing ambitions. It's not even a matter of competing talents and achievements. When we go to the polls to elect a President, we're supposed to be thinking not about just the candidates, but about the country, and about what the top priority of this nation needs to be right now. And I don't think that's hard to see.

It is hard to see if you are listening to some of my colleagues, because I think the only thing any of them seem to think is important in this country is money, and what's related to it. And I guess there are a lot of people who agree with that. I particularly go to a lot of the meetings of Republican donors, and so forth and so on. I guess they agree, people who have money think it's real important.

But as I go around the country, I see a lot of people who realize that this nation's problems are not just money problems. And indeed there are a lot of them. I've been gratified by that. Since I spoke to you last year, I've been all over the nation, and a story will illustrate the reaction.

Last night, Lamar Alexander and I were looking over the crowd in South Carolina--and I don't think the Governor will mind my telling this little story. He commented that it was good that we had gatherings like this because it would be hard for any one of us to get a crowd that big together. There were about 2500 people. And I looked at him and said, "Well, I don't know about that, Governor. I spoke to a crowd of 2200 just came out for me in Rockford Illinois, just last night. And I spoke to a crowd of 1200 in Cedar Rapids and 1500 in Idaho City, and hundreds and even several thousand in San Antonio." Nobody's watching, of course. These people with the cameras out there, I suspect they turn them off when I come up to the mike, but that's okay.

Because people in the country are understanding this anyway. And you know what they are responding to. It's a very simple message. It's a message of priorities. Not a laundry list of applause lines to see who's going to applause when you talk about where you stand on this and that. It's all well and good, but what we need to be thinking about is where are we right now, just the way Ronald Reagan came forward in 1980 and understood what the top priority of this nation's life had to be. And because he understood what the priorities where, we were able successfully to defeat international communism and get out of the economic malaise that had been left by the Carter administration. It wasn't a laundry list of things to do. It was a clear priority that corresponded to the challenges facing this nation's life.

And the priority before us now is real simple and real clear. Because you look at what is driving the problems right now in the streets and in the cities and in the towns, what is ruining the environment for education in our schools, what is driving up the welfare budgets, what is destroying us in terms of intensified crime. And it's not that we haven't spent enough money through the federal government's budget. We've spent literally trillions of dollars dealing with each and every one of these problems, and it hasn't done us a bit of good. They've all gotten worse. And you know why? Because we have retreated from the basic building block of this nation's life.

Our top priority as a people is clear. Every single one of these problems is being fed and caused and aggravated by the collapse of the marriage-based, two-parent family. We are going to fix the family system, or we're going to perish. [applause] That's clear.

And I got to tell you, all over the country I say that, and I get a great response--even those of you who are wearing your Dole and Alexander and Gramm stickers tonight, you know this is true. One of these days, you are going to ask yourself why those you follow do not make this a priority. And they don't. They think they are going to balance the budget. And I'm watching this little charade--I call it a charade, you'll excuse me--in Washington. I hope they get a deal to balance the budget in seven years. But I remember that they made a deal to balance the budget in five years in 1990, and here we are five years later, and they're making a deal to balance the budget in seven years. Why are we supposed to consider it progress that they are going to do in seven years what they told us five years ago they would have done by now? Are we supposed to be stupid or something? [applause] I understand. I don't care how many deals they make to balance the budget, what's really going to matter is whether they stick to those deals.

And as long as we don't have the right kind of answers for the demagoguery of Bill Clinton, we're not going to make headway. And we don't have them now. Since 1994, we have seen some of the responses, I'm afraid, of the Republican leadership turning what should have been the last hurrah for Bill Clinton's politically moribund administration into The Night of the Living Dead. This guy is walking around the country just like he has a political chance in 1996. And he doesn't. But he does, if we continue to define the issues as more government and less government, and more spending and less spending--like the only thing that matters in this country is money.

And Bill Clinton will stand up and say that it matters that we take care of the old, and it matters that we take care of the children, and it matters that we care about each other. And you know something? He is absolutely right. It does matter. But it also matters how we do it.

And I think it's time we stood up and stopped talking about money all of the time and started making it clear that the difference between Democrats and Republicans is not more money and less money. It's those who want to take care of people with a heartless, impersonal government and a check, and those who understand that the love of family life is the way we should take care of each other. It is not more government, less government. It's more government versus strong families. And that's what we've got to build. [applause]

Now, I see that clear, strong message gets real hearty applause everywhere. Every Republican agrees on this. I see it all over the place. It is something also, by the way, that unites people across party lines: black folks, white folks, Jewish folks, Protestant folks--doesn't matter. They're seeing our young people bleeding their lives out into the street. They're seeing them turn to gangs and murder and prostitution and all these kinds of things that are destroying their life--not at eighteen and nineteen anymore, but at twelve and thirteen and fourteen. Our children are dying in this country. And we're talking about it like we're going to solve the problem with money.

Well I'll tell you something. You spend all the money you want in the world at any level of government you care to, you balance all the budgets you think you can balance. But if you don't get balance back into the heart and stability and strength back into the family, we will not resolve these problems. We will still lose the future, as the next generation dies. So I think it's time we woke up. It's time we woke up. We need clear priorities, and that clear priority has to be to rebuild the American family on the basis of the integrity of our strong American principles. A commitment that cannot be second place, that has to be first place.

And there's only one campaign in this country that is pursuing that commitment right now. And that's the campaign of Alan Keyes. And we are going to continue to pursue it. Because, you see, I didn't have to be educated about this. And I don't have to tack it on at the end of my speeches. I stand today where I stood last year this time when I spoke to you, where I will stand again in the months ahead and the weeks ahead. It will not change, because this country's desperate situation has not changed. It is not a joke. And it is not a time for playing games. We have a nation to save, and a generation that is destroying itself to pull back from the brink of destruction. And we will only do it if we turn our face back to those principles based on God's will, not our own, that reject that definition of freedom that sanctions abortion and the destruction of our heart for family life and that supports the God-given view of unalienable rights that sees us as a people who need responsibility first before God and to our future.

Thank you very much.

[applause]