So Maryland’s own homegrown Harold Stassen is going to throw his hat into the ring to be Illinois’ GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate. How lucky for Illinois. Dollar for dollar (which he pays himself), nobody tops Alan Keyes for sheer entertainment value when it comes to running a campaign for elective office.

Back when I was in my final semester as a columnist at the University of Maryland’s Diamondback newspaper in 1988, Alan Keyes was running for the Senate against Paul Sarbanes. Keyes did a campaign stop on campus, but since he wasn’t a household name back then, he brought along Fawn Hall, the leggy blonde secretary famous for shredding Ollie North’s documents during the Iran-Contra scandal.

The man knows how to campaign, I tell you.

Knock knock!
Who’s there?
Alan Keyes!
Alan Keyes who?
That’s show biz.

Keyes got his clock cleaned in that 1988 campaign. In the general election, Sarbanes brought in almost a million votes from across the state, 62 percent of the ballot. Keyes, with 617,537 votes, garnered 38 percent. Four years later, when Keyes ran against Barbara Mikulski, his totals went even further down. Mikulski tallied 1.3 million votes, or 71 percent, whereas Keyes slid to 533,668, or 29 percent of the vote. Maybe he should have brought along Gennifer Flowers.

In 1996, in the Republican presidential primary in his own state, supposedly as a “favorite son” candidate, Keyes pulled in only 13,718 votes—a meager 5 percent, and less than the total number of registered voters in Kent County that year.

Q: What’s the difference between Alan Keyes and the Hindenburg?
A: One’s a flaming bag of hot gas, and the other’s a dirigible.

According to a report in the Chicago Sun-Times, Keyes actually told a member of the Illinois Republican Party establishment that his would-be opponent, rising Democratic Party star Barack Obama, “didn’t really represent the views of the people of Illinois.” This from a guy who, in his last run at office in his own state, didn’t appear to represent more than a handful of percentage points of the voters in his own party.

Q: What does Alan Keyes’ ego have in common with the Great Wall of China?
A: Both are man-made creations that can be seen from space.

This isn’t the first time Keyes has been sought to leave the Land of Pleasant Living and run against a Democratic Party star. Back in 2000, according to the Chicago Tribune, right wingers in New York wanted him to pack up and run for Senate against Hillary Rodham Clinton. Man of principle that he, uh, was, Keyes shot down the idea on the Fox News Channel on March 17, 2000.

“I deeply resent the destruction of federalism represented by Hillary Clinton’s willingness to go into a state she doesn’t even live in and pretend to represent people there. So I certainly wouldn’t imitate it,” Keyes said at the time.

It’s kind of hard to figure out who comes off looking sadder from this little pas de deux: Keyes or the Illinois Republican Party. Here’s Keyes, who has failed at his every attempt at elected office, and failed at his attempt to host a cable TV talk show on MSNBC, the fourth-rate network famous for finding obscure right-wing nutballs and wackjobs to spew bile in the nether hours. And here’s the Illinois GOP, whose first Senate candidate, Jack Ryan, dropped out after it turned out he lied when he said there was nothing embarrassing in his divorce papers. Well, except for that little business about wanting to do the horizontal bop with his wife in public at sex clubs in the United States and in France. For a good Republican, that’s gotta be embarrassing. Not the sex clubs, which we’re all in favor of here at Animal Control, but that he wanted to do her in France.

The U.S. Census Bureau says that the state of Illinois is home to some 12.6 million citizens. Maryland has less than half that: 5.5 million. Yet the Land of Lincoln needs to come out here to lure away our homegrown failures to run for office? What is this nation coming to? The Chicago Tribune probably said it best in an editorial that ran before Keyes even officially announced he was in the race: “He will run and will lose. And then he will hop on the next flight back to Maryland, and the state’s GOP will be left with nothing but the smell of jet fumes.”

What makes Alan run?