The Audacity of Hope

Dick Cheney’s daughter—“selfish hedonists,” and insisted that adoption by gay couples
inevitably resulted in incest. He called the Illinois press corps a tool of the “antimarriage,
anti-life agenda.” He accused me of taking a “slaveholder’s position” in my
defense of abortion rights and called me a “hard-core, academic Marxist” for my
support of universal health care and other social programs—and then added for good
measure that because I was not the descendant of slaves I was not really African
American. At one point he even managed to alienate the conservative Republicans who
recruited him to Illinois by recommending—perhaps in a play for black votes—
reparations in the form of a complete abolition of the income tax for all blacks with
slave ancestry. (“This is a disaster!” sputtered one comment posted on the discussion
board of Illinois’s hard-right website, the Illinois Leader. “WHAT ABOUT THE
WHITE GUYS!!!”)
In other words, Alan Keyes was an ideal opponent; all I had to do was keep my mouth
shut and start planning my swearing-in ceremony. And yet, as the campaign progressed,
I found him getting under my skin in a way that few people ever have. When our paths
crossed during the campaign, I often had to suppress the rather uncharitable urge to
either taunt him or wring his neck. Once, when we bumped into each other at an Indian
Independence Day parade, I poked him in the chest while making a point, a bit of alphamale
behavior that I hadn’t engaged in since high school and which an observant news
crew gamely captured; the moment was replayed in slow motion on TV that evening. In
the three debates that were held before the election, I was frequently tongue-tied,
irritable, and uncharacteristically tense—a fact that the public (having by that point
written Mr. Keyes off) largely missed, but one that caused no small bit of distress to
some of my supporters. “Why are you letting this guy give you fits?” they would ask
me. For them, Mr. Keyes was a kook, an extremist, his arguments not even worth
entertaining.
What they didn’t understand was that I could not help but take Mr. Keyes seriously. For
he claimed to speak for my religion—and although I might not like what came out of
his mouth, I had to admit that some of his views had many adherents within the
Christian church.
His argument went something like this: America was founded on the twin principles of
God-given liberty and Christian faith. Successive liberal administrations had hijacked
the federal government to serve a godless materialism and had thereby steadily chipped
away—through regulation, socialistic welfare programs, gun laws, compulsory
attendance at public schools, and the income tax (“the slave tax,” as Mr. Keyes called
it)—at individual liberty and traditional values. Liberal judges had further contributed to
this moral decay by perverting the First Amendment to mean the separation of church
and state, and by validating all sorts of aberrant behavior—particularly abortion and
homosexuality—that threatened to destroy the nuclear family. The answer to American
renewal, then, was simple: Restore religion generally—and Christianity in particular—
to its rightful place at the center of our public and private lives, align the law with
religious precepts, and drastically restrict the power of federal government to legislate
in areas prescribed neither by the Constitution nor by God’s commandments.
In other words, Alan Keyes presented the essential vision of the religious right in this
country, shorn of all caveat, compromise, or apology. Within its own terms, it was
entirely coherent, and provided Mr. Keyes with the certainty and fluency of an Old