"I Think The Black Guy Will Win!"

By now, you must have heard that the Republicans in Illinois have found a candidate to go against Democratic Senate candidate Barack Obama, who is hoping to become the first black male Democrat to be elected to the Senate. After losing original candidate Jack Ryan in a sex scandal, and sailing trial balloons for football legend Mike Ditka and rocker Ted Nugent (!!), the Illinois GOP is drafting another black candidate, conservative commentator Alan Keyes.

Wait a minute, you ask - isn't Keyes from Maryland? Yes, he is - which means Keyes will have to move to Illinois and establish residence there to run, and the election is less than three months away. Even Hillary Rodham Clinton - ironically, an Illinois native - was more savvy in setting up residence in New York to run for the Senate there.

I suppose it's appropriate that both major parties are running black Senate candidates in the state that gave America Abraham Lincoln, but Alan Keyes has no connection to Illinois voters and to state politics. He's a former Reagan adminstation appointee who couldn't get elected to the Senate from Maryland and couldn't cut it as a talk show host on MSNBC (even Deborah Norville is more credible in that occupation!), and who undistinguished himself by running for President in 2000 and jumping into a mosh pit set up by Michael Moore. But he is running as a Republican, and the GOP has done extraordinarily well of late getting underqualified candidates into elective office.

So who will be the next U.S. Senator from Illinois, the Land of Lincoln? To paraphrase Don Rickles's prediction of the outcome of the February 1964 fight between Cassius Clay (now Muhammad Ali) and Sonny Liston. . . , if you ask me, I think the black guy will win! :-D