Helen Valois
Deputy Grassroots Coordinator
August 23, 2007

There were the petition signers. They wore Brownback and Tancredo stickers, homemade Huckabee hats, and mass-produced Romney shirts. Some of them stood out by donning plain clothes that betrayed no particular candidate affiliation at all. "Alan might run again? Why didn't anybody tell me?" was the reaction from most of them. "I'm for (fill-in-the-blank), but I'd back Keyes for sure, if only I could."

They stood in line for their turn to wield the pen, with signatures totaling two hundred in one day. Even when I left the booth for some purpose and went out among the crowd, I was sure to feel a hand on my elbow, due to our conspicuous and patriotically-colored "We Need Alan Keyes for President" tees.

"Is Alan running?"

"Is he here?"

"What can I do to help?"

These were the refrains of the day.

There was another identifiable group, as well. These individuals tended to glance at the petition and at us with signs of puzzlement, during the nanosecond before their faces froze into expressions of determined indifference. After that, they didn't say anything or answer anyone, even when directly addressed. They undoubtedly saw and read our striking banner, and heard and understood the video clips of Alan that were running in a continuous loop, but they gave no further sign of interest or comprehension. You could pretty much guess what the laminated tags they wore around their necks were going to read, before you actually read them. Even from a distance, one could invariably make out the bold-faced word:

MEDIA.
There were also, of course, exceptions to these trends — cutting both ways. "Somebody said to me, 'Who is this guy?' and I said, 'Alan Keyes,'" reports my seven-year-old, Maryann, who along with her brother hung in there like a trooper all day, approaching people with Keyes literature and the petition drive message. "And then they said to me, 'I don't want your brochure.'"

Donny, at age nine, was treated a little more roughly. He had a man shove some literature back at him with the hostile remark, "Alan Keyes! I don't want him for president or anything else!"

But these were isolated incidents. "I talked to one guy who was really, really enthusiastic," Donny recalls. "When he saw what I was handing out, he said, 'Alan Keyes? Where do I sign on?' and just about ran over to the booth where the petition was."

"I talked to a mother with a two-year-old, and I gave her a brochure," Maryann adds. "She said she liked Alan Keyes, so I told her all about the petition. Later, when I was talking to other people, I saw her over at the booth, signing her name."

Among members of the attending press, one occasionally encountered exceptions to the "see no Alan, hear no Alan, speak no Alan" attitude as well. Stephen Stone, who is spearheading the "We Need Alan Keyes for President" movement, gave a number of hard-hitting interviews. I myself was approached by someone from a political website, who wanted to know why I would bother to back a non-candidate in the first place. After citing the painfully obvious reasons, I thought, hours later — with twenty-twenty hindsight — of what I wish I had said:

"Why ask me? Why not ask the countless people here and throughout the nation who are begging Dr. Keyes to run again, who may appear to be supporting other candidates but who are only doing so, on closer inspection, faux de mieux? There's the real story of this primaries season — the story that the managers of our collective attention span are mortally afraid might somehow trickle out, despite their best efforts."

Why not ask the tall and heavy-set person who said to me with a snort, "Alan Keyes? Hasn't he run several times before?"

"I take it you have never heard, sir," I replied with the mildest of smiles, "of the early career of a gentleman called Abraham Lincoln?" The guy broke into a good-natured guffaw, headed straight for the booth, and put his John Hancock solidly on the line.

Why not ask the black man who told me he is sick and tired of hearing that the country "isn't ready" for an African American president?

"When's the last time you heard any such opinion expressed about a certain Barack Obama?" I pointed out. This guy didn't start laughing, however. He spent the next ten minutes earnestly fleshing out my own thought for me, in quite a number of worthwhile ways.

Why not ask the woman who told me, her eyes fixed awkwardly on the floor, "I've committed myself to work for the campaign of Tom Tancredo. But, if Dr. Keyes decides to run again . . ." There was a pause. Then she picked up her head and looked me straight in the eye, leaving her sentence eloquently incomplete.

Not everyone, of course, could be reached. I spoke at length, for example, with a Catholic priest who said he was going to be voting in the primaries for Sam Brownback. "But, Father," I argued, "how 'pro-life' is a guy who has already admitted he is ready to jump on the Giuliani bandwagon, should the time ever come?" — alluding to his candidate's hand-tipping admission during the recent Republican's debate.

"My dear, I'm quite certain that Brownback would never say any such thing," was Father's serene reply. "Sam is a dedicated pro-life man, and there is no need for Catholics or anyone else of good will to look any further for a place to park their vote." That was his story, and he was sticking to it, full in the face of clearly-established and irrefutable fact. We parted on amicable if unresolved terms, and he gave me a blessing and said a prayer for the success of our work.

"Maybe, Brownback just meant to be politically savvy, the way Santorum did when he stood by Arlen Specter," a friend volunteered on this subject — not actually at the Straw Poll itself, but during a conversation several days and states later, on the subject of my interaction with this particular priest.

In Brownback's case, I noted, we are talking about a politician putting his support behind a pro-choicer as Chief Executive, not behind some warm body needed to balance out numbers in a committee. "And, by the way," I felt I had to point out, "did this approach do Santorum himself, or the pro-life movement in general, any real good?" My friend grudgingly admitted that it hadn't.

It always makes me suspicious when a politician's sympathizers find they have to justify, speculate, and theorize, in order to make something their guy has said or done appear to be conservatively correct. That is not a predicament that I, as a long-time backer of Alan Keyes, ever find myself in, at any rate.

"But, Helen," said another friend — who was being regaled with tales of our trip and shown photos of all of us at the booth smiling for the camera and saying "Keyes!" — "tell me the truth. I believe in everything Alan stands for and all of that, but do you really think he has a chance?"

That word "chance" is becoming eerily reminiscent of another word all too unthinkingly and ubiquitously employed these days — the word "choice." Nobody seems to stop and ask, in the context of presidential or other politics, "a chance of what?"

A chance of selling out everything important, all for the sake of manipulating someone's way into office?

A chance of becoming as wise as doves and as innocent as serpents?

A chance of forfeiting the incomparable legacy of liberty bequeathed to us through bloodshed and sacrifice, all because we can't be bothered to look up from the froth of our raspberry lattes long enough to take stock of what is providentially required of this generation of Americans, right now?

"Alex," I replied (his name has been changed to protect the media-influenced), "what I believe is that, with God, all things are possible. You'll note that our effort isn't named 'We Calculate Political Outcomes,' or 'We'd Rather Vote for a Guy with No Substance, So Long as He Wins,' or 'Let's Defeat Hillary and Barack Even If, In So Doing, We Have To Become Just Like Them Ourselves.' No; it is called 'We Need Alan Keyes for President,' because that is the simple truth."

"Whether Dr. Keyes is inaugurated next time around or at any time in the future is in the hands of God, not to mention the hands of those of us who call ourselves His servants. To stand for Alan is not reducible to advocacy of a particular candidacy.

"It proclaims to all that the renewal of our country demands more than just flippantly guessing which of the media-anointed frontrunners might do the least damage to America for the next four years, and then voting — a privilege that people throughout history and the world have laid down their lives for — with nothing more than a shrug.

"It sends a message to the Republican leadership that they will not continue to betray the unborn and the Terri Schiavos of the world — not with our tacit blessing, at any rate.

"It takes our common conversation back to the roots of what is wrong with our imploding society, rather than just jumping ahead to the next ersatz 'solution.' It's not as though, even if President Keyes were to take office a year or so from now, our work would then be completed."

Alex knitted his brows. "There's not a word of that I can honestly disagree with," he said. "Where do I sign on?"

"At www.americasrevival.com," I told him, as I have had the privilege of telling hundreds of Americans at the Iowa Straw Poll and beyond. "And while you're at it, spread the word about the website to everyone you can think of!"