Practicalmadness

Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo has been giving great coverage of the recent announcement of former GOP presidential candidate Alan Keyes as Barack Obama’s opponent for Illinois’s vacant Senate seat.

If anyone thought that Alan Keyes was going to start marching around Illinois spouting clownish bombast and giving Barack Obama a chance to play the statesman in the face of the Illinois GOP’s cynical nonsense, boy do they have another thing coming.

Today Keyes attacked Obama for taking the “slaveholder’s position” by voting against a ban on late-term abortion which had no exception for protecting the life of the mother.

“I would still be picking cotton if the country’s moral principles had not been shaped by the Declaration of Independence,” Keyes said. Obama, he said, “has broken and rejected those principles — he has taken the slaveholder’s position.”

When asked about the “slaveholder” comment, Obama told the AP that Keyes “should look to members of his own party to see if that’s appropriate if he’s going to use that kind of language.”

For our non-Illinois readers who aren’t closely following a Senate race in another state, this campaign is the first time that both major party candidates for the Senate have been African-American. Keyes was offered the spot on the ticket not only because his blackness might somehow mitigate for black voters the fact that he’s a pompous ass, but because of his reputation as “a master debater.” So maybe Keyes’ll get in a few good shots before he is totally steamrollered by Obama, a rising Democratic star whose natural talent for working a crowd into a lather is being compared to Bill Clinton’s.