'Alan Keyes makes Obama seem like Don Knotts'

Says Dallas GOP master of ceremonies

During a recent swing through Houston, Galveston, and Dallas, presidential candidate Alan Keyes told voters they don't need to settle for a candidate who isn't a true conservative.

"I stood up to run for president this time because I feel people ought always to have [a] choice — a choice they don't have to be ashamed of, they don't have to excuse, they don't have to apologize for, and finally, most importantly, a choice that represents them," Keyes told one group.

Keyes said that when he looked at the field of candidates back in September, he felt "like Adam," finding no one "like himself" who represented a consistent view of conservative principles.

Foremost among the principles Keyes said were lacking in the leading candidates of either major party was unfailing commitment to ensuring government of, by, and for the people, above personal ambition or party politics. Instead, he said the other candidates — and the parties themselves — were preoccupied with gaining the White House at the expense of the sovereignty and security of the nation and the integrity of the electoral system.

Keyes told how his votes were not even counted in the Iowa caucuses, how he was excluded arbitrarily from several state ballots, and how he was barred from most of the presidential debates. Such elitist behavior by self-serving political interests, he said, was tantamount to "Soviet-style politics" — not consistent with the American democratic tradition.

Keyes said what was needed this election was "truth," the kind that he had personally strived to exemplify in the political arena for decades, he added, and he noted that "the true aim of a party is not to get the people to elect the party, but to get the party to represent [the] people."

Typical of Keyes' remarks during his recent Texas blitz was a speech he gave last week at a Lincoln-Reagan Dinner sponsored by the Denton County Republican Party, where he shared speaking honors with Sen. John Cornyn.

Master of ceremonies Mark Davis of radio station WBAP introduced Keyes as an honorable man "whose ideas belong in the Oval Office" and who often can be found "eating some unlucky liberal for lunch." After Keyes finished his remarks, for which he received a standing ovation, Davis quipped, "Kind of makes Obama seem like Don Knotts."

The comment prompted laughter and applause from the hundreds of attendees.

Below are highlights of Keyes' Denton County Lincoln-Reagan Dinner address:

"This republic is in crisis. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people is threatened with its demise. And if we wonder why folks are angry, discouraged, and disappointed, it's because on every front, they know good and well that the government that's supposed to depend upon their will no longer cares about their interests, priorities — no longer cares about the things that they do."

"The first and primary job of the government is to secure the territory of this country."

"You can't win elections with rhetoric. You've got to win elections with truth. And that means you've got to take account of the things that people are really feeling, what they're really saying about you. . . . How can you tell us that our country is secure when you've left our borders wide open to the enemy. [The people] don't believe [you]."

"Judicial tyranny . . . has been usurping the role of our legislatures at the federal and now, sadly, even at the state level in some places — where judges are arrogating to themselves the right to make our laws, and even from the bench to dictate what the legislatures will do. And you go back and read our founders — it's not very hard to understand that this kind of judicial power dictating to the executive branch and the legislative branch is the very definition of despotism and the loss of freedom for our people."

"[Such usurpation] means that a little oligarch of black-robed judges will substitute themselves for government of, by, and for the people, and that we will have government by judicial fiat, instead of government by consent. This is not a fiction. It's not something that might happen. It is happening."

"I have to tell you, the field of candidates that we were offered this time — by virtue of a process, by the way, that sought systematically to exclude the voice of real grassroots conservatism, because they systematically, by hook or crook, by cheating, and by arbitrariness, excluded my voice from just about every debate, from just about every discussion — why didn't they want to let a voice be heard that is speaking from the heart and the principles and the conscience of grassroots Republicans, no, of grassroots Americans from all across this country? I'll tell you why. Because if you know the truth, it doesn't just convict Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama of being communists and leftists — it convicts our leadership of having neglected, far too long, to fulfill the promises we have made to the American people! This must come to an end."

"If we want to win the victory [as a party], we've got to stop pretending to ourselves that we shall win it by scaring people to death with our Hillary masks, our Obama masks, and our bogeyman rhetoric. It has worked once or twice, but I can promise you, it will not work this time — any more than scaring them with Democrat control of Congress secured our victory in 2006. No, if we want their trust back, and their faith back, and their allegiance back, then we must trust the truths upon which this country was built, we must show faith in the convictions upon which this party was founded, and we must stand up to represent that positive good, that better destiny, of liberty, responsibility, self-discipline, and true hope for humanity that this party has summoned up as the vision of American life from Lincoln, through Roosevelt, through Reagan, and through all the great presidents — who understood that more than the party of selfish coalition-building, we are the party that builds the American community, based on the union founded in our agreement upon the most important principles that start with the principle of our allegiance to the authority of our God."

Keyes — who served as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations under Ronald Reagan and wrote his Harvard dissertation on constitutional theory — will end his swing through Dallas with an election-eve rally Mar. 3 at the University of North Texas' Gateway Ballroom in Denton. The event begins at 7 pm.