The Nose drips thinking of what life must be like for big-spending perennial candidates. We’re not talking about voices in the darkness like A. Robert Kaufman, the veteran local lefty who runs for office at every opportunity, plastering the same old signs onto the same old minivan and making the rounds to exploit the attention that each election brings to the politically marginalized. No, we’re talking Alan Keyes, the Montgomery County Republican who makes running for office look like the stuff of late-night TV advertising: “FREE MONEY!”
In Maryland, Keyes ran for the U.S. Senate in 1988 and 1992. Then he went national, running for president in 1996 and 2000. At each outing, he distinguished himself not with winning votes but with his flair for living off the campaign kitty. He’d pay himself, hire chartered planes and limousines—high style, from start to finish, and a great way to publicize his nonelection career on the lecture circuit. Between Alan Keyes Enterprises, his private company, and his various bids for office, Keyes has managed to carve out a nice piece of the American pie: three-plus acres and 4,000 square feet of house assessed at $715,000 in the Highlands of Darnestown development near Gaithersburg. That’s a far cry from Kaufman’s $93,000 digs on Hilton Street in West Baltimore.
Now Keyes is at it again, preparing to suck up dollars from his pro-life, pro-death-penalty faithful to bankroll another campaign binge. This time he’s running for U.S. Senate in Illinois, as the GOP foil against current state Sen. Barack Obama, the Dems’ overnight sensation whose late-July speech in Boston at the Democratic National Convention was arguably the event’s only memorable moment.
“It’s going to be an interesting race,” Illinois GOP communications director Jason Gerwig tells the Nose over the phone. Voters in the Republican primary chose Jack Ryan as their candidate, but he withdrew in late June after his divorce papers revealed embarrassing details about his sex life. (“If you do a Web search, you’ll be quite entertained” by Ryan’s downfall, Gerwig says.) After a brief flirtation with former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka, the state GOP central committee considered both Keyes and Andrea Grubb Barthwell, a former federal anti-drug official, and last week its members picked Keyes.
It’s déjà vu all over again for Keyes, the Nose notes, except this time he has to move to Illinois to run. In 1988, the Maryland GOP’s candidate for U.S. Senate, businessman Thomas Blair, won the primary but withdrew soon after—due to “unspecified personal and business pressures,” the Associated Press wrote at the time. The state central committee voted overwhelmingly to run Keyes as his replacement in an unsuccessful stab at toppling incumbent Sen. Paul Sarbanes. In 1992, Maryland Republicans actually picked Keyes—the first and only time he’s won a race; he took 46 percent of the primary vote for the right to lose to Sen. Barbara Mikulski in the general election.
This time around, Keyes is a late arrival in an open-seat race facing Obama. The Illinois state senator’s campaign committee is already in overdrive, thanks to the the fund-raising efforts of Jim Cauley (the rainmaker who also rents his magic to Mayor Martin O’Malley’s campaigns) and the accounting acumen of Harvey Winestine, CPA to a host of celebrities. As of June 30—well before his post-convention bounce—Obama’s organization had raised nearly $10 million and spent two-thirds of it, leaving around $3.4 million on hand.
So what about Keyes’ money? Gerwig tells the Nose that Keyes’ Illinois organization will have to be a new federal campaign committee. “That’s something he’ll be doing, is setting that up,” he says. And in setting up campaign committees, Keyes—a former diplomat with an impressive Ivy League education—has real experience.
According to the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), 28 campaign committees have been formed by or for Keyes since the mid-1990s, but most of them have closed down. Alan Keyes for U.S. Senate, which handled his 1992 Maryland bid, was terminated in January 2003 after a debt-reconciliation plan allowed the committee to pay $22,000 of $54,000 it had long owed to four companies. Two other active committees—Alan Keyes for President ’96 and Keyes 2000—are laden by combined debt exceeding $500,000 and have a grand total of only $4,000 cash on hand. To make matters worse, Keyes 2000 was assessed a total of $2,250 in FEC fines for this year and last for failing to file required disclosure reports. It looks like Keyes will be starting from scratch in Illinois.
Nearly half of the combined debt of Keyes’ two presidential campaign committees—about $225,000—is owed to Politechs Inc., of the same Alexandria, Va., address as Keyes 2000. Another $52,000 is owed by Keyes 2000 to its own treasurer, William Leo Constantine, an accountant based in Reston, Va. Thus, like the 1992 U.S. Senate committee, Keyes’ 1996 and 2000 presidential campaign committees may be headed toward debt reconciliation—though at least two of the major debtors are close to the campaigns, and thus presumably agreeable to taking pennies on the dollar.
Politechs is indeed close to Keyes. Its president and CEO, Mary Parker Lewis, is also Keyes’ longtime chief of staff.
“I’m not worried about what is owed to me by the committees,” Lewis said over the phone on Aug. 6. “No one has ever been substantially harmed financially” by the shoddy record of payments by Keyes’ committees, she explains, adding that “these things have always gotten out ahead of him,” and that “now we’re better at” managing campaign finances.
As for whether any of the new campaign money soon to be raised for the Illinois race will be used to pay off previous campaign debts from Keyes’ presidential bids—including the money owed to Politechs—Lewis is adamant: “There has been no contemplation of that whatever.” The Nose will keep that mind when the dust clears from the Land of Lincoln battle.
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