Alan Keyes
November 3, 1996

Thank you very much.

Well, I'm not sure how one could hope to hear from me exciting news two days before the election. We're gonna have to wait to hear that.

Though, on the way in, or just before I started here, I did take the time to do a little browsing on the net to see what was going on, and the latest polls and stuff today. And, as I've been predicting for weeks on my radio program, the race is tightening up, and will obviously not be the twenty-point blowout that some people had anticipated on account of whatever strange polls were being taken in the course of the last several months.

The poll that will be taken on Tuesday is going to be a poll that, I think, reflects the common sense of the American people. And, one way or another, that common sense, for good or ill, is going to prevail. And that means, probably, that we're not going to see some extreme result in the sense of a lopsided victory for one side or the other. Races are tightening up in Florida, and in Ohio, I understand, and in places like this. It looks like, they are now saying, the Republicans will probably hold on to the Congress--I never doubted that, actually.

But I am not going to spend my time this evening engaging in too much political prognostication, since I actually don't think that the underlying reality of American politics is going to be much affected by what happens on Tuesday. I think that that reality is what it is, and we are going to see it play out over the course of the next several years, one way or another.

What I would like to talk about is my own sense of what this election signifies, and why it has taken the sometimes very strange course that it has taken in the course of the last several months. And I do have to say that it is one of the strangest elections I've ever seen.

I especially remember thinking that about a week ago, when there was a report in the newspaper that Scott Reed had gone to ask Ross Perot to drop out of the race. There are many, many reasons why this didn't seem like the world's best idea at the time. But, you have to ask yourself why it is that the strategists in the Dole camp, or whoever might have come up with that--the word "strategist" is probably polite--would have thought that it was a good idea.

To understand that, I think you have to know something, or think of, what got us to where we are right now in America's political life. And I will present a take on that that's probably a little different than what you're likely to hear, than what is already, I think, being written by commentators and pundits.

Indeed, a lot of articles in the last week have [been] bold to assume the outcome of the election. Charles Krauthammer had a piece the other day that the editors of the Post saw fit to entitle "Why Dole Lost." Now, I saw that and I said, "Golly, did I miss something? Like Rip Van Winkle, I went to sleep, and a week later I woke up and the election was over!" Well, not quite, it hadn't taken place yet, but Krauthammer was writing, with the great confidence that can be exuded by people who know a lot of things that the rest of us don't--or think they do--that the election was over and Dole had lost, and he was explaining why.

And I think his explanation is probably very like the explanation, if that were to be the outcome, that we will hear from various quarters. You know, "Dole lost because he didn't stand for anything. Because it was mush," and this and that and the other thing. He went so far as to say that if he had stood strongly as a conservative, or even if he had run consistently as a Colin Powell moderate, the outcome would have been better, and so forth and so on.

I read through that column and I said, well, that is a way of saying that substance doesn't matter. And that this election has been entirely decided on the basis of--of what? The fact that Bill Clinton is, I don't know, a better debater, that he presents himself more suitably, or something like that, that he's not quite as old, doesn't come across as quite as dower . . . what is it?

Well, they are assuming that it's everything except substance. And I think that that's false. I think that this election is going to be decided by substance, or lack thereof, and that that is going to have a decisive influence on what happens in the course of the next several years. Why?

Well, for one thing, because people are always fighting the last election. If I were to point to one major error that has been made by Republicans, as they were thinking about this election cycle, it would be that they fought the last election. They were like generals; a famous observation made about American military strategy is that our generals were always preparing to fight the last war. Now, it's much smarter to prepare to fight the next one. But it's hard to do that, because that's in the future, so you go over the battles, and you see what happened last time, and you try to make sure that it doesn't happen again.

Well, there was a myth about what happened in 1992. A very strong myth; had no real basis in fact whatsoever. And yet I think it had a decisive influence on a lot of thinking in the higher echelons of the Republican Party.

And that myth went something like this: there was George Bush, you know, incumbent President and so forth. And he was doing pretty well, and then started doing a little less well. But all things considered, he should have been headed for re-election. And then they had that nasty, awful, bad, stinking Republican Convention that talked all about family values and put off the moderate voters and the independents. And he went down to defeat.

Now, you know, this story was concocted in the wake of the 1992 election. I say "concocted" because there were no facts to back this up. Indeed, if you look at the course of reality for George Bush, he rode high for a while after the Persian Gulf War. But by the time we had come to the midst of 1992, George Bush wasn't riding high at all. Indeed, in the summer, as I recall it, before the great "budget deal" and so forth of 1990, he was already being called a one-term President in the newspapers. Then the Persian Gulf War intervened, gave him a jolt. But by the time you got into mid-1992, he had settled back into the doldrums that had characterized his presidency before the Persian Gulf War.

Then the Republican Convention occurred. And if you go back and review what actually took place in the polls of the time, you will find that George Bush took a leap after that convention--anywhere from six in the lowest, to sixteen in the best result that was produced in the polling. That means that the Republican Convention took those doldrums and gave him a shot in the arm. He was running behind, and he was either running even or ahead by the time the convention was over. That's the truth. And that meant that the actual impact of the Republican Convention, strong in its emphasis on the need to address the family/moral crisis in America, was very positive.

Now, the Washington Post and other newspapers of that stripe--and I think also, to tell you the truth, Democrats in the country--understood how powerful and potent these particular issues are. And I'll talk about that a little more at length in a minute. And so what did they do? Well, if you see your enemy coming at you with a really good weapon, you've got to disarm them. And so they started writing about how awful and nasty and bad the convention was. They demonized Pat Buchanan--the way they've demonized, or tried to demonize, Newt Gingrich this time around--and hung him around George Bush's neck and said, "That's the awful Republican Party. You can't vote for them." And they pretend that that had some decisive influence on the election.

It did not, by the way. George Bush didn't lose because people were put off by that "terrible" Republican Convention that talked about family values. He lost because of the disaffection of people who had seen the Republican Party as their defenders against the encroaching power of Washington to take all the money out of their pocketbooks. And when he betrayed them by breaking his "no new taxes" pledge, they left. And a lot of those independents, Reagan Democrats and others--they couldn't bring themselves to vote for Bill Clinton, so they voted for Ross Perot in protest. George Bush went down.

That was an election, by the way, that Bill Clinton did not win. Since that time, every time somebody tries to pretend to me that Bill Clinton won the election in 1992, I say, "Where have you been?" This man in 1992 got about the same percentage of the vote that Democrats had lost with consistently up to that election. And what has him in the White House today is that that chunk of voters that normally sit in the Republican presidential coalition, they decided that they weren't going to back George Bush, since he wasn't doing what he had promised them he would do, and what the Republican Party essentially, on the economic front, has to do. It has to hold the shield of defense in front of the small-business people and the working middle-class people of America, defending against the encroachments of a government power that has great concern to play to the galleries of those who are part of the "gimme" constituency that lives off the government, great concern to play to the gallery of those who actually live directly off the government, who are employees and so forth of the government--that's the Democrat coalition--but not a whole lot of concern for the actual working people who produce the money that all those other people are living off of.

Now, when Republicans show themselves unwilling to do their job, the people who normally vote for them don't vote for them. And in 1990, when he kind of "went along to get along" with the Democrat leadership in the Congress, George Bush didn't do his job. And since he didn't do his job for them, there was a big chunk of voters out there who decided they weren't going to do their job for him, and he lost.

But the interesting thing about that situation, which I think everybody misses, is that if George Bush had, in fact, followed consistently the themes of the 1992 convention, he would have won that election, anyway. Because there is in America a set of concerns broader and deeper than the money concerns. A set of concerns so powerful that the entire political establishment in this country, Democrat and Republican, is deathly afraid of them. [They] don't know what to do with them. These issues are so powerful because, unlike the others, they are not the result of the steady manipulation of rhetoric, in order to turn insignificant differences into significant ones. That's what a lot of our politics consists in now.

I was mindful of this during the course of the so-called presidential debates in this election year, as I watched Mr. Dole and Mr. Clinton, in their different ways. And I thought Bob Dole did a better job than some people give him credit for in both debates. And he said pretty much what he had to say. And I think he spoke from his sincere understanding of the major difference that separated him from Bill Clinton. And at one point he summarized it quite well, as he saw it. He said, "He (Bill Clinton) is going to grow the government at twenty-percent, and I (Bob Dole), I'm going to grow the government fourteen percent. And there's the difference between us."

Now, I gotta tell you that, I, myself, didn't wake up surprised the next day to find that the American people didn't go wild with excitement over that difference. And the reason, I think, they don't go wild with excitement over that difference is because the difference between fourteen- and twenty-percent--it's a significant one, you get behind it, in terms of its economic impact and so forth and so on, but viscerally, most Americans don't really believe that this is going to have a deep effect on the things that they worry and are concerned about every day. They don't. And so, you draw the election in those terms, you're gonna have a serious problem.

Of course, there was another serious problem that still, I think, dogs the heels of the Republican Party today. And that is that you're running against a sitting President in relatively good economic times. This is not to say they're gonna stay good, because I think every sign is that they are not. You know, the people who go into the voting booth and vote for Bill Clinton, if they do happen to be ratified by the overall result--oh, I think somewhere toward the end of the second year of his first term [transcriber's note: this must be a mistake--he must mean "second term"] they will find themselves cursing the day they ever did so. Because they'll be sitting in the midst of this recession, wondering what hit them.

But it's all being postponed, in various ways, now. And, if you look around you right this minute, and take stock, I think that standing--and I kind of felt sorry for our guys, I really did--standing up against the President at this particular time and saying that the difference between us is that this terrible economy is his fault, and we're gonna fix it: it doesn't really work, and it was never fated to work. I said this for months. Months and months and months, I told everybody who would listen, including Dole himself: "You can't run against a sitting President on economic issues in relatively good economic times. It will not work. Can't be done."

Why? Because every time you say that the economy is bad, they will dish up a figure to show you how good it is. And we do have to remember, don't we, that they are in charge of producing the statistics now. No, no, this is a cause for laughter, but it's also not an accident that these statistics not only look good, they look better than they ever have! Now, you look behind them and you will find that one of the euphemisms that covers this wonderful look is that pretty much all of those statistics--the statistics on health, the statistics on illegitimacy, the statistics on employment and unemployment--have, in the years of the Clinton Administration, undergone serious renovations in their methodology. I bet that surprises you. Well it shouldn't. It's actually true.

There was a good article, by the way, on this the other day in the Investor's Business Daily--went through every single one of the changes that have occurred in major statistics being reported by the government in the last three years. And there has been a major change in the methodology of all of them that pretty much makes comparisons with the past useless. And the result of those changes in methodology is that without anything else going on in the world, the numbers look better than they ever have. That's just an incidental fact, but I actually not only would have, but did, predict this fact before it happened. Because it didn't surprise me in the least that, with your hands on the levers of government, you would use it to kind of rosy up the picture a little bit before the election took place, make people believe things were a little better than they really are.

And that was also in the context of a time when the usual lag of economic results was still in effect. You know, Americans feel good about economic recovery just about the time they're about to go into another recession. And they start to feel really bad about the recession just about the time they're going to go into another recovery. And, sadly speaking, I have to tell you, that in the last two election cycles, the Republican candidates got caught in that cusp. George Bush was presiding over an economy that was, at the time of the election, according to all the figures that were there, getting better, but that's not how people perceived it. Bill Clinton is presiding over an economy that, when you look behind some of these roseate figures that are coming out, is obviously going to get worse, but that's not how the American people perceive it.

And so, on economic grounds, you are quite literally spitting in the wind. You have one guy over here running on his claimed performance. And it is true, when a President stands up to claim that he is responsible for a wonderful economy, it's all a lot of bunk. No President is responsible for our wonderful economy. They don't have that much to do with whether it is good or ill. But, if you happen to be presiding (that is what "Presidents" do, right?) at the time that the economy does reasonably well, you take credit for it. And that's what Clinton is doing. "This is MY doing! I take credit for it!" Of course he has been taking credit for some things that he directly had no credit for. We'll talk about that, too, in a minute.

But I just want to set this up so that we will all see what I think is the great conundrum that the Republican strategists faced--insofar as they were, most of them, obsessed with this notion that you had to run against Bill Clinton on economic grounds, and that this was somehow going to be the key that opened the door to some kind of Republican majority. And it's not. It simply is not the case that that's where the Republican coalition that has emerged, in fact, in this country, to be the majority--that's not where it comes from. At all.

And I could cite every election, chapter and verse, in the course of my lifetime so far to prove that point. In fact, I can't think of a single one that Republicans won, where the issues were defined strictly in economic terms. Not one.

This is why I stood back and I marveled. I said, "Why are they doing this? This is not the way we win! We don't win when you spit into the wind and pretend that we are greatly advantaged by economic analyses and all these economic discussions. We're not!"

Do you know why? Well, it's very simple. Because if you get into the race between Santa Claus 1 and Santa Claus 2 as to who is going to put more money in thy purse, the race is going to be won by the most unscrupulously generous Santa Claus. And this is exactly what we've seen this time around in the economic discussion. Though, of course, it was actually not a race between the generous Santa Clauses; you could also see it as a race between the budding scrooges. Why? Well, because of this big thing. The Democrats have been going around with their "Medi-scare" stuff, saying "Republicans are going to destroy Medicare! They're going to cut back this and cut back that!"

Truth of the matter is, none of these guys are talking about cutting anything. None of them! The government establishment is going to grow. It's going to grow under Bob Dole, as he says, by 14 percent. It's going to grow under Bill Clinton by 20 percent. We are not arguing about whether this establishment will grow! (We should be, but we are not.) We are arguing about HOW MUCH it is going to grow.

And, with something like Medicare: they weren't arguing about whether Medicare was going to grow; they were arguing about whether it was going to grow at 7 percent or 14 percent. So that Mr. Clinton had to be a scrooge, because he was cutting back, too. But they did have a little better propaganda on this point. Because they were able to get everybody to think they way Washington has us all thinking these days--so that a decrease in the rate of increase is presented as a cut and everybody's supposed to get all excited. Well, unless we're quite stupid, we shouldn't get that excited.

But in that kind of a debate, the distinction that was drawn was not a distinction, I think, that led a lot of Americans to look at the situation and say: "Well, we better get this guy Clinton out of here, 'cause he's gonna do terrible damage to me, and terrible damage to the country, and the pocketbook and the budget and so forth." It just didn't take. Because on economic grounds, right now, on the money grounds, it's not gonna take. And I would ague that it never has.

Think about every election we've had in the last, oh, I don't know, say, at least since the Second World War. And cite one of them for me in which a Republican won and the major issue of the time was economic. Jeopardy music plays . . . and nobody comes up with an answer, because you can't. The one that comes closest is the election in 1988, where the Democrats actually were trying to do exactly what the Republicans have been trying to do this time: convince everybody that a pretty good economy was an awful one. They didn't get away with it then; we have not, clearly, gotten away with it now.

Because people are not stupid. They can read the papers, they can see the numbers. They can kind of figure out for themselves that we're not falling over an economic cliff right this minute. There's the usual level of anxiety and apprehension that will always exist in every economic time. But it's not so major that you can actually mobilize any large chunk of voters with it. And so, over here you had Clinton's performance, however falsely claimed; and over there you had Bob Dole's promises. And what was his promise? He was gonna cut taxes by 15%. We won't go into all of the difficulties which they faced in the making absolutely sure that nobody reviewed too closely his record on the whole tax issue while he was making this promise. And they did have to take great pains to do that.

But he made it. And some people actually believed that this "put money in thy purse" approach was gonna get everybody all excited: "We want that money; we're gonna take it," and so forth and so on. I never thought so. And I think I've been proven right. This was not what was needed at the moment.

Now, why have I set this up this way? Am I such a gloomy Gus as that? To believe that all along there was no opportunity? No! Actually, there still is. And as a matter of fact, I think in the last three weeks or so, Bob Dole has more consistently exploited the obvious than they did before. On the economic front, Mr. Clinton's vulnerability is, oh, like this--[Keyes holds his hands up, six inches apart]--it's a narrow little door. If you can find it, and get through it, you might even farm a few votes: nothing like what you need to win.

Then you just more your perspective, just a hair, and look behind that economic issue, and what do you find? You find the most scandal-ridden, morally corrupt administration this nation has ever known. And you find that administration coming before us at a time when it not only represents the difficulties of a few individuals, but it actually represents the coming of age of the crisis of an entire series of generations. Bill Clinton doesn't just represent the follies of Bill Clinton. He doesn't just represent the habits of Bill Clinton, the difficulties of Bill Clinton--his cronies and so forth and so on--no! He represents things, and results, that are premised on ideas that were wrongly accepted by some part of several generations of Americans, and that basically can be summed up very simply, "There is no clear distinction between right and wrong. Therefore, buck up, because life consists in whatever you can get away with."

And so they're out there! Getting away with it as best they can. And promising to everybody that, if they just come along, no rule will be so strong that it will have to be respected--not in Bill Clinton's America. That promise of the "easy-going," "if it feels good" future that began in the 1960's, and that came into the White House, full-blown and in the flesh, when Bill Clinton took the oath of office.

That is, in fact, the choice that's before America today. Are we gonna ratify the delusions of that generation, or instead are we going to look around us and begin to take stock of the real consequences of those delusions? The destroyed lives, the broken families, the young people without guidance frittering away their lives--and in some cases, unfortunately, tragically ending those lives in every possible form of mayhem and self-destruction. Are we going to begin to look at the crisis of dissolving families, of schools filled with violence, of streets filled with fear? [These] are not the consequence of some great money crisis.

We are not in the midst of some great depression that can somehow explain this depravity. We're not! In the midst of times of profound peace, in the midst of times of relative prosperity, we look around us and we see the moral fabric of this country disintegrating, and the sewage consequences of that disintegration literally overwhelming cities, towns, states around the country. And Bill Clinton epitomizes the "easy-going," "if it feels good, do it," "there is no difference between right and wrong" approach to things that has gotten us into this shape.

Now that, I believe, is the choice that has to be put before the American people. And in the course of the last several weeks--I would have to tell you, quite honestly, maybe a little more out of desperation than anything else--Bob Dole has been putting that case. And isn't it interesting that the more consistently he puts it, the more the poll numbers close. Why? Because these are the powerful issues.

Everybody thinks that Americans are a people who care only about money, but that's not true. We are a people defined more than anything else by our sense of moral principle. It is what distinguishes us from most other nations in the world. Why? Because that's all we are as a people. We are not of one ethnic group; we are not of one race; we are not of one creed; we are not of one kind, in that tangible, material sense that some nations are. We are a people defined, in fact, only by our common allegiance to certain moral ideas--certain very fundamental moral ideas, about the dignity of each and every human being, and what that implies, and where it comes from, and what limits it imposes on the power of government, what responsibilities it implies for individual human beings. That's what we are about.

And somewhere in our deep heart of hearts we know that the greatest crises this nation has to face are not the crises of dollars and cents and budgets, and all of that. They are the crises that leave us faced with the great moral choices, the great moral dilemmas, where we shall decide not what kind of budgets we shall have, but what kind of people we shall be.

And, sadly speaking, that was the question that Bill Clinton puts before the American people more clearly, I think, than any President ever had: "What kind of people do you want to be?" Now, I think we can put this in more concrete terms very simply. And it's something that I did suggest to my colleagues, although I'm not sure they picked up on it. Because the election could easily have been fought out in terms that would have brought this out very clearly.

Where is it that people are most assuredly concerned with what kind of people we are becoming? What one area of life is it where that's gonna be the paramount concern in their lives, no matter what else is going on in their existence? When it comes to what? When it comes to what?! Raising their children! How many parents do you know want their children to grow up to be Jeffery Dahmer? Really! How many parents do you know want their children to grow up to be people who lie, who cheat, who kill, who steal, who violate trust, who don't keep promises? Nobody!

Everybody's out there struggling--even if they're awful people--most of them would like their children to be something else. They would like their children to maybe have some of the virtues they saw fit to neglect. They make all kinds of excuses, of course. "Well, I had to neglect those virtues so I could put that money in the bank. Now YOU can be virtuous, because it's there." You know, all kinds of excuses can be made.

But the truth is that we see our aspirations most clearly when we look at the attitude people take toward their children. And that's the one question that should underlie this election result that really hasn't even been put to the American people. And yet it is the one that should be put to them. Very clearly. I did it with my radio audience the other day, because I think it's key. Because the key question is not how you explain your vote to Alan Keyes, to this one or that one. No! The key question, for those who have kids, is very simple: how are you going to explain your vote to your children?

And right now it has become very clear what kind of an administration we're dealing with. Leave aside all this other junk. I know, the "mess of pottage" arguments: "He's taking care of the economy; he's taking care of the handouts; he's taking care of this and that and the other thing"--all the material stuff he's supposedly taking care of. But at what price? At what price?!

At the price of holding up before the people of the world an image of a President of the United States sitting on one end of the phone, while his key advisor on family values chuckles with his whore on the other end of the phone. This is the image we're projecting to the world! But not just to the world. We're projecting that image in such a way that we are gonna have to look at our children--whom we say we want to grow up to be decent human beings, understand their promises, keep their obligations--we're gonna have to say, "That's the kind of person who goes farthest in America, reaches the very top." How are we gonna explain this to our children?

And I thought it was really the height of irony, too, that this should be the man who was responsible for Bill Clinton's turn to family values. It was really wonderful irony in that, don't you think? A revealing truth came through there. And that revealing truth is what I think the election is in fact all about.

Now, there's a reason--and this may be troublesome for some of my Republican confreres to hear--but there's a reason why the obvious vulnerabilities of the Clinton Administration were not exploited in this election. And they weren't. Come on, who are we kidding? How many of you saw the commercial that prominently featured Joycelyn Elders that was done by the Dole-Kemp campaign? None of you saw it! Because it wasn't done! You know? It wasn't done! And yet anybody in their right mind would have approached this election, taken that woman, and hung her around his neck. Because she spoke the truth that's in his heart! And the American people needed to be reminded of that, and nobody bothered! Why not? One could have done . . . It's not even a guilt by association.

Oh sure, analyze for a minute one of the famous commercials, the "I didn't inhale" commercial. It was in one respect quite effective, wasn't it? It reminded people: here's a President that was asked about this drug thing in front of kids, and actually made a joke about it that would encourage them to think it doesn't matter! Now, that was the point of the commercial. It's a pretty good point. But there was a problem with it. Because the point that the President was making then was that he didn't inhale, but would . . . could have, or if he'd got another chance . . . But what does this imply? This implies that we shall take him at his word that he didn't inhale. How many people here really took him at his word? I don't know many Americans who did. And yet the commercial did. The commercial assumed that he was truthful about that. So at one level it ridiculed his lack of seriousness about the issue, but at another level it ratified the lie that he was telling to the American people. Isn't that strange?

The irony of that struck me when I watched the commercial. Because I think there would have been a much more effective way of presenting Bill Clinton's problems with drugs. And you didn't have to wait for the last two weeks when Mr. Cabrerra was prominently featured with Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Gore, either. Bill Clinton has a long familiarity with drug dealers. Because when he was Governor of Arkansas he pardoned one, for no good reason in the world, so that he could make money working before the State of Arkansas! What does it tell you about someone that they feel so close to--a convicted cocaine dealer that they want to make sure he can go on making money? That's an issue! Where was it in this election campaign?

That's the pardon issue, by the way. No, it is! You make a wonderful commercial, in which you talk about the fact that he's thinking about pardoning some people, and then you examine his record on pardons. And prominently feature Mr. Lassiter. You know? That was the first question I remember really bothering me about this administration: why did he pardon Dan Lassiter? Does somebody here have an answer to that question? Why do you pardon a convicted cocaine dealer? Why do you feel so buddy-buddy with him that you want to make absolutely sure that he can go back to work? This doesn't compute! It doesn't make sense! Unless you finally begin to recognize the true character of the people you're dealing with. But why wasn't all this used? Not a single one of these little tidbits--and there are many more--were really brought before the American people. Why? Why?!

I've been asking myself this question for weeks. And I think the answer's very simple. I think that we actually have common ground among the elites in this country right now. They have agreed--all of them--that they wish to drive the moral concerns of the American people out of our political life, or redefine issues in such a way that we do not have to deal with those concerns. I'm not sure what their motives are. I think they're very afraid of those moral issues, because, after all, moral issues are the ones that end up tearing people apart. Slavery, for instance. At some level, when you start dealing seriously with moral questions, people get real serious and you take a great risk. But then, at some level, if you don't deal seriously with them, then they deal seriously with you and you take an even greater risk--as your country dissolves in chaos.

That, unhappily is where we're headed, because, in a sense, the underlying truth of this election is not the difference between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton. It's the similarity between them. And that on one side and the other, amongst the elites in American politics today, there is an effort to encourage the moral indifference of the American people.

Now it turned out, of course--and I predicted this, by the way, so it's not the wisdom of hindsight--it turned out that if you went down that road of moral indifference, you were gonna find it real hard to beat Bill Clinton. Because his great vulnerabilities required that the American people pass a moral judgment about what he represented. And to tell you the honest truth, I don't think the Republican leadership wanted to cast the election in those terms, because they are so afraid of the moral issues. It was the only route to victory. But I don't think it was a route they were all that prepared to take, and I'm not sure they are, even now, all that comfortable with it.

And that's not something endemic just to them. I think it exemplifies a problem we have now with our leadership overall: Clinton representing moral indifference in the extreme--morality doesn't matter at all--and others who represent moral indifference in that they are afraid to confront, clearly and openly, the true moral dilemma that we face as a people.

And that, I think, explains why the election has played out in this peculiar fashion. Things always look peculiar when folks are dancing around the truth. Strange things happen when there is an obvious question that needs to be answered, and nobody's willing to bring it up.

I thought that there were very telling evidences of that during the course of the debates. You remember the second one: as you led up to the second debate there were many people who were saying that it was gonna be hard for Dole to raise the character question, and so forth. The moral issues were going to be very difficult to bring up. But what intrigued me as I watched the debate was that question number one was such an issue! The very first question anybody got up to raise was, "We teach our children to believe one thing, and then they see folks doing something else. How are we to deal with teaching our children?" This was a gift from God, this question. Mr. Clinton treated it as if it was a question about our religious diversity and how we shouldn't take religion seriously enough to aggravate that diversity. You had to read between the lines to get that answer, but it was clearly there. And Mr. Dole took it as a question about the 10th Amendment, and proceeded, in very skilled fashion, to answer a question that was not asked, in order to deal with an issue that did not matter at that point.

This was very indicative of where we are right now. We are faced with a leadership that does not wish to face the truth. And this election will play itself out on those grounds. Somebody will win, somebody will lose. But it will not affect the underlying reality that the real crisis that we are in has not yet been faced by the American people. For, it is not the crisis of whether Bill Clinton or Bob Dole will lead us; it is a crisis of whether this whole leadership is going to be called to account for its abandonment of those moral ideas without which this society cannot survive in freedom.

We are not a nation built on ideas about economics. We are a nation built on ideas about justice. Abandon those ideas, and eventually we will abandon the nation.

And so, over the course of the next little while, you are going to see, I predict--I've been pretty good at predicting, lately--I predict that in the next four years what you are going to see is the emergence of the true fault line in American life right now. It is not Democrat/Republican. It's not liberal/conservative. It is moralist versus materialist--people who believe that the challenge we face is fundamentally the challenge of restoring the moral fabric of the country, and people who will go on following the stupid delusion that the great challenge that we face is tinkering with the American economy. This lie will get us nowhere.

But there are signs on the horizon that they're not going to be able to continue with this ignorance for too much longer. Because, the grass roots of the country have begun to organize and mobilize to deal with real issues. Why? Well, because parents are concerned about their children, that's why. Because people watching generations destroying themselves are waking up and realizing that we must DO something if we are to stop that self-destruction.

And I think that that's going to become the obsessive concern of the American people in the years ahead. We have seen it growing in the course of the last decade. And now no one can avoid it. I think the one truth that really struck me about this election was that, in this election two things were true: if you were a conservative, you had to let people know. If you were a liberal, you had to lie about it. That's very significant.

If you were somebody who doesn't care about moral issues, and were really disgusted every time somebody mentions family values, you had to lie about that, too. And you had to find a way, in every election--I thought it was fascinating, as I went around the country, every candidate, Democrat and Republican, was including in their commercials something that appealed to people's concern about family values, personal responsibility, moral discipline. Why? Because the truth is clear and obvious. We cannot escape it. And because many, many Americans are, in fact, motivated now by a concern with this nation's moral crisis.

The polls show that, by the way, when you are not concerned with politics. When you just ask people, out of the political context, "What are the major challenges we face today?" Economics no longer comes at the top of the list. And it has not for the last several years. The major concerns are social, moral issues. And this will grow worse. Because the crisis we face, as a result of our moral decay, is growing worse and will continue to grow worse until we resolve that we're gonna do something about it.

That resolution will not come as a result of the choice that we make on Tuesday. But I think the choice that we face on Tuesday will be one of the motivating factors in bringing together the coalition that will force this nation to deal with those issues in the years ahead. THAT is the coalition you should look out for, because it is the one that, God willing, is going to govern America at the dawn of the 21st century.

Thank you very much.

Q & A session

Question: Mr. Keyes, a pleasure. I think we both can agree that Bob Dole is not a candidate, neither during the primaries nor now, who has particularly embraced the conservative, traditional values that you seem to espouse. In fact, during the primaries the only candidates that probably talked about it sincerely was both you and Pat Buchanan.

But, if I recall correctly, during the primaries the only candidate you seemed to attack is Pat Buchanan. And I was just wondering, in retrospect now, how you feel about what you did to the pro-family movement and pro-life movement by discouraging those particular voters for voting for a candidate who could have done a great deal, and a lot better than he did, if it had not been for you and what you have said about him?

Keyes: That's not true. I never attacked Pat Buchanan. That's a lie. Name one attack I leveled against Pat Buchanan.

Questioner: Well, I traveled the country with Mr. Buchanan, and I seen you speak countless times . . .

Keyes: When did I attack him? Give me an example?

Questioner: Um, Alaska? During the straw poll? Where you said . . .

Keyes: Give me an example.

Questioner: OK, I believe you said in Alaska that if you vote for Pat Buchanan, you are electing the Pope to the United States presidency.

Keyes: That's a lie. I never said any such thing, and would never have said any such thing. You see? And that's part of . . . and I will say this about the Buchanan campaign. Those kinds of lies were characteristic of the campaign. So don't expect me to have love lost for a campaign that tells those kinds of lies, because I don't deal in them.

You can look at every speech I ever gave. I NEVER talk personalities. I NEVER attack people at a personal level. I talk ISSUES. And those issues do sometimes involve moral challenges, moral choices, moral questions, that can come down to issues of personal judgment where I disagree with people. But I would never make a statement like that about Pat Buchanan, or anybody else.

I did, by the way, draw clear distinctions between Pat and myself, because we're very different people. I am a great believer in the American Declaration of Independence. Because I think that the Declaration states clearly our basic principles of justice. So when Pat went to the Christian Coalition in New Hampshire, and he said that his approach to America was the Bible and the Constitution, right? I went right after him, and I corrected that to what I believe is the truth. You know?

America cannot be governed by the Bible, because not everybody in this country believes in the Bible. So if you want to have the influence of those moral principles, which I and others who are biblical believers believe must prevail in a decent and just country, you better find a way to talk about those principles that is open to everyone, regardless of their religious denomination. And do you know where we get that? We get that from the creed stated in the Declaration--which is not stated in terms of this denomination, that denomination, that religion or the other religion; it is stated in terms of the moral truth that applies to ALL human beings, regardless of those differences. It is, as I called it there, the bridge between the Bible and the Constitution. And I will stand on that bridge, and heal America's wounds.

You see? But there are real differences between Pat and myself, but those are issue differences. They have nothing to do with this scurrilous trash, and I never deal in that. NEVER deal in it.

Questioner: I must have been wrong.


Question: Firstly, sir, I would like to thank you for being a voice of reason for both America and the Republican Party. You've been very helpful in this election for bringing out what the real issues really are. My question to you is, as voters have seen Bill Clinton's political ideology seem to change over his administration, what exact political ideology do you feel Bill Clinton truly embraces at heart, at his heart?

Keyes: What political ideology does Bill Clinton truly embrace in his heart? "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." (Laughter) No. I think that that's Bill Clinton's ideology. And I say that seriously, by the way. I am not saying that by way of simply saying a funny statement. And that corruption is not, I am sad to say, limited to Bill Clinton.

If you look at the course of American thinking about political things, starting in the fifties, social science and other sorts of things started to emphasize what? They started to look at political life as if it were entirely about the competition for power. Read the texts that started to be written then! The analyses and the interest and all of these kinds of things that are now kind of taken for granted in American "social science." And the people like Bill Clinton, when he went to Yale, and other people, when they went to Harvard--you heard this! This is what you learned. This is what politics was about. The great questions of justice and morality and all of that--put it to the side. The great questions that constitute the identity of a people--don't matter. Politics is about power. It's about the competition for power among individuals and groups. "This is how it's done; this is how they get it. This is how we'll analyze it and reduce it to empirical facts," and so forth.

So what I just said about his ideology is, in fact, a reflection of the ideology that rules the American elite today. An ideology that is totally devoid of serious thinking about political life. Becaus,e in point of fact, power is an instrument. And human beings approach that instrument with some sense of what they believe it is good or bad to do with it. Even if that good is only their own pleasure, their own vanity, their own glory, it is still a sense that there is a good to be achieved by having it or using it. You see what I'm saying?

So, at the bottom of it all, politics is not all about the competition for power. It is about the competition among different ideas of what is good, what is bad; what is right, and what is wrong. And our political leaders want to forget this, want to ignore this. And the man who epitomizes this forgetting--and this is why, to tell you the truth, I think on all sides in American politics there is a certain . . . among the politicians, there is a certain breathless admiration for Bill Clinton. He is doing what many of them would love to do, and he's getting away with it. You know? They would love to be able to listen to their consultants, say whatever they're told to say to win, and get everybody to believe that they're sincere about it, when it's quite obvious that they can't be. This is the epitome of American political life, because then you are the vessel that can best handle this ruthless competition for power, in which the only objective that matters is success. If that's what politics is--and ALL OF THEM were taught this (some of you are still being taught it, I'm sure), all of them were taught it--if that is, in fact, what political life is about, then Bill Clinton is one of the masters we've seen.

But if it's not what political life is about, then he's one of the most destructive forces to appear in American politics ever in our history. And if we embrace him, we will be embracing the death of our Republic. That's the choice we face. So that, I think, is his ideology. His ideology is power. But it is the ideology of the American political elite, when you scratch them. And that elite--some Republicans as well as some Democrats--is now, I think, a great threat to this nation's future.

Question: Mr. Keyes, we've heard a lot about the future of America. We've heard it referred to as a wall, a brick building, and a pile of bricks. And I'm kind of wondering: where do you see our country in the next twenty years?

Keyes: I don't know.

I mean, some part of me is tempted to answer that question in a flippant fashion. America, right now, is sort of, I don't know, it's like the stuff that floats on the top of the water in the toilet, and the American voter has their hand on the handle. And it's called "Bill Clinton" and they're about to flush us down the drain. That's a possible scenario.

No, I'm quite serious about this. We can't go on this way. We cannot go on believing that there is no moral content to our liberty. That rights can be defined in any way we choose, without respect for the limits on those rights implied by the authority from which we derive them. We can't go on with this licentious folly and expect that this nation will survive in peace. It will not! The crime will increase until it becomes anarchy, and we'll go down the drain.

And that is true in an economic sense too, because you can't motivate people to do quality work if they don't know the difference between right and wrong. It's one of those things that, at some point, people wake up in their lives and they realize that they're never gonna be really rich. They do. Most people do. They wake up and they realize, "Huh! I'm gonna die. I'm not gonna be really rich. I'll never be Donald Trump."

What is it that can make a life rich, if you know you won't have riches? Is it going to be Bill Clinton's promise that your Social Security will be there? A promise that is a palpable lie, if they don't do something to reform the system? No. It can't be that. I think that the riches you have when the riches are not going to be there are the riches of the heart, the riches of the spirit, the riches of moral truth, which you can exemplify in your actions anytime you please. And which become the rich memories that give comfort to old age and that make death less forbidding, because you have lived in a way so as to be worthy of life. You see?

And so, if we kill all of that, then people get real frustrated. No, really! An edge creeps into human life when you think that the only thing that matters is what matters--that material things are all that's there. Then, if somebody else has them and you don't, there is no room for compromise. There is no room for patience. Don't you understand this? We will fight each other like vicious beasts soon, if we don't begin to restore a sense of moral decency to our souls. That, I think, is just true. So that's one scenario. And I think that it's quite possible for the country.

On the other hand, I think that there's a much more hopeful one. And that more hopeful scenario, I believe, comes from the fact that we're still basically a decent people. You know, we're desperately trying to talk ourselves into this notion that depravity is normal in America. This is what everybody's doing, as they march to the polls to vote for Bill Clinton. This is what I get on my radio show. I keep [saying], "Call up, please, you Clinton voters. Tell me why you're voting for Bill Clinton! Give me a good reason." And the good reason usually is, "You know, well, he's taking care of the economy all right. And as for this moral stuff, it doesn't matter 'cause they're all like that." Are we all like this? Because, you know who these people are, don't you? We call them "politicians." Yesterday, they were house painters, and they were teachers, and they were business people, and they were lawyers--they were you. If we despise our elected leaders, we are despising ourselves. And if we despise ourselves, in the end we will despise the self-government which depends on our judgment. And we'll throw it away. We won't want this freedom; it'll stink too much.

And so, I think that's possible, but I think that's not true--we are not like this. We are not depraved. Bill Clinton has defined a new benchmark in terms of the depths to which American moral judgment can sink. He really has. We have not seen anything like this before. This is not normal, and we shouldn't accept it as normal. We are still basically a decent people.

I'll give one example, which shocked me--still does. And I wondered why there wasn't a commercial about it. Because, I would have had one. And that was the episode at Waco, which I still do not understand. I don't understand it. I don't understand how it happened in America. And it's not that I am blaming somebody for the actions of some nut or other. No. That's not the point. The point is that when you go over the record of that episode, there was no reason why they attacked that compound, except they got tired of the situation. Eighty-five lives, including innocent children.

And if you had asked me . . . as a matter of fact, one of the reasons it shocked me, and still does, is that the ethos of government that I learned--the ethos of government that I assumed to be common to most Americans who entered into any government office or life--was that you never, ever, took a decision that would take a human life, unless your back was ABSOLUTELY to the wall. Her [Janet Reno's] back wasn't to the wall. She just got tired. They had lost some sleep. And so people died. We don't do that; that's un-American. I'll use the word, the hated "fifties" word. It's not something Americans do. See, that's not normal. And that still sticks in my mind as one of those things that says to me, hits me in the face and says, "Wait a minute. There's a real difference of moral principle here."

And it runs across the board. From Waco to partial-birth abortion, there's just a real difference of moral sensibility.

But I don't believe we have gone that far. I don't believe Americans have, in fact, sacrificed those principles. I think they still move the American heart, and I go around proving it, every time. People say I'm a great speaker. I'm not, really. I don't speak very well at all. But I do know one or two things that speak to the American heart, and I talk about them all the time. So I cheat a little.

And it's true: Americans still believe in justice; we still believe in individual dignity; we still believe that each of us, as individuals, have a responsibility to respect those ideas of rights and dignity the country was grounded on. So we still accept the notion that there are limits to our freedom, and that we must be disciplined, as well as free.

And I think a coalition can and will be built, based on those ideas, that will bring this country back from the brink. And so I have the hope. But it's not a hope of some shining technological future, with the New Age Internet and all of these kinds of things. You know, I love the computer stuff--as my wife knows, to the point of nausea sometimes--and I get involved with it. But I refuse to worship it. Because I understand that, however much fun it may be, and whatever wonderful horizons it opens up, all these things are just our instruments. And instruments, in the end, must be shaped by the moral context we give to them.

And so, if we don't get that right, it won't matter that we have these wonderful instruments. For, they will end up being instruments with which we construct a more effective prison house for the human spirit than has ever been constructed before. Or, it can be a source of great liberation, but it's not going to liberate by itself. It will liberate only in the context of an understanding of human nature that allows that liberation to take place, because we trust ourselves again. And we'll only trust ourselves again if we believe we're decent people.

How many of you want to live in a free society populated by Jeffery Dahmers? You don't want people like that to be free! You want them to be locked up! So if we adopt the moral view that leaves us, in principle, without much distinction between ourselves and Jefferey Dahmer, except our opportunities are fewer. . . do you think that we'll want to live as free people in a society of such depraved beings? We won't.

So I think we must face the moral crisis. I think we will. And I think in doing it we will renew America's moral foundations for the next century.

That is what I consider to be our great challenge, as we approach that somewhat mythical divide, you know, which is very much like one's birthday. Everybody says "happy birthday," and you're supposed to feel that some remarkable thing has happened, but the truth of the matter is it was just 24 hours since you were not this or that. And the same thing's gonna be true of the year 2000. It'll come and go. And we will still be the people we are making ourselves into today. For better or worse.

So I don't think that Bill Clinton is the bridge to the 21st century. Because, quite frankly, I don't know that we need a bridge. Generally speaking, the river doesn't require one. And we are the river, flowing through time. We are not the shore. We shall determine the direction, because we're supposed to be the leaders in this country, "We the people."

And so, the crisis is the crisis of America's identity. And I think we are going to face that identity crisis. We're gonna find some voices to articulate it for us. And the reason I have that hope, too, is because we have strong principles that were articulated by Founders who, for all their faults, actually achieved some moments of incredible clarity about the nature of politics and justice. And if we can, even for a bit, recapture that clarity, we'll set this nation back on the right track.

Question: Mr. Keyes, using the first question as an example tonight, when will the Republican Party stop the infighting and the bickering, and unify between moderate/conservative, pro-life/pro-choice, and go on into the future, into the 21st century? When will that happen?

Keyes: Never!

The Republican Party is never going to "unify" on some issue that ignores the essential difference between those who are willing to tolerate the essential evil that is destroying us today, and those who wish to see it ended. There is no room for compromise on that. And it will not be compromised.

They thought they were gonna compromise it this time. They thought they would come up with some schmarmy language in the platform that would compromise the party's commitment on the pro-life issue. They didn't. And they WILL not.

And I say that unequivocally. 'Cause I'm like a lot of people in the Republican Party; we laid ourselves on the line this time. We'll lay ourselves on the line EVERY time, to keep this party from making that tremendous error. OK? If Bob Dole, in his delusions about that, had reached out to take Colin Powell as his vice-president, with his openly pro-abortion position, the party would have split, and that would have been the end of it. And every time they try it, they will face the same consequence. It will never happen. Why? Because if the Republican Party smears over that difference, then I'll tell you, there will be no essential difference between Republicans and Democrats. That's what I'm trying to point out here.

The fault line of America's future is between those who take seriously our moral crisis, and those who don't. If you try to paper over our facing of that moral issue, in some way that pretends that there's no great distinction between Colin Powell and Alan Keyes, for instance, you're fooling yourself. There's a tremendous difference. And that difference between the morally indifferent and the morally concerned . . . I'm gonna fight, for everything I'm worth, to keep the party that I belong to on the side of the morally concerned.

And, sure, if the morally indifferent want to come along for the ride because one of the implications of that moral discipline is a belief in free enterprise . . . it is. You see, I'm an economic conservative--one of the strongest in the country. One of the first, too, by the way, who articulated the whole supply-side economics thing, and all of this, right? But that's neither here nor there. Do you know why I'm a conservative in that sense? I believe in free enterprise because I believe people have the moral capacity to make the right judgments about how they use material things. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't believe in free enterprise. Destroy character, and you destroy the capacity for economic freedom. Preserve character, and you preserve the best argument for economic liberty.

And those who don't understand this are not real fiscal conservatives. And they'll end up like Ruth Ann Aarons (sp?). Do you know who I'm talking about? She's a lady from Maryland. She ran as a big "fiscal conservative" against the moderate Mr. Brock back in 1994. The other day, she came out to endorse Bill Clinton. Some people were surprised; I was not. Why not? Because, when I was approached about her and people were trying to convince me she was a big conservative, I had only one question: where does she stand on the unborn? And at first they tried to hide it, and then they said, "Well, actually she's against abortion, BUT . . . ." And the "but" was one of those "buts" you can drive a truck through. Right? And so I said, "No." Because--some people say, "Is that a litmus test?" No. It's not a "litmus test"; it's just an indicator. If you don't take the moral issues seriously, then you're not a real conservative.

And I'd invite you to go back and read all the great philosophers of conservatism who ever lived--including Adam Smith--and you will find that at the root of their economic philosophy was a belief in the primacy of moral virtue and moral character. Throw that out the window, as some of these shallow-pates are trying to do today, and you're no conservative--you're just a liberal trying to fool us into voting for you.

And I won't be fooled. And, as I have been watching around the country, some of the Republican primaries--it looks like the grass roots people of the party are no longer being fooled. That's why Brownback is running in Kansas. That's why Salvi is running in Illinois. That's why Lightfoot, whom I was just campaigning for, got the nomination in Iowa. We won't be fooled anymore.

And that's why the great battle that's going to shape up in the four years ahead, if Bob Dole does not win the White House--which is not a foregone conclusion, because God's still in His heaven--the race that will shape up will be epitomized by two forces. One, visible; one, the media will try to keep invisible, but will still be working. It's Colin Powell liberals versus Alan Keyes conservatives. Colin Powell is their great hope for letting the Rockefeller-wing back into primacy in the Republican Party. It's not gonna happen. It is not going to happen.

But there's gonna be a big fight over it. And, actually, that fight is healthy for the Republican Party. I am looking forward to it.