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  FRAME GAME
The Invisible Man
By William Saletan
Feb. 16, 2000
Slate.com

If you watched last night's Republican presidential debate in South
Carolina-and you weren't already a committed supporter of George W. Bush
or John McCain-you'd be hard pressed not to conclude that Alan Keyes won
it. If, however, you missed the debate and read about it in this morning's
newspapers, you'd hardly know Keyes was there.
Ignoring single-digit candidates is standard practice in political
journalism, but the coverage of last night's debate provides a
particularly egregious illustration of how this practice makes a mockery
of democracy.

Keyes is legendary for his rhetoric, so let's look at the other criterion
for judging who won: the substance of the arguments. Here are a few
highlights of his performance.

1. Negativism. Bush and McCain go at each other for several minutes over
which of them started the mudslinging in South Carolina, who threw the
worst mud, and who's still throwing it. Keyes listens for a few minutes
before pointing out that the broadcast is "going out to 202 countries, and
is this kind of pointless squabbling really what we want them to see?
We're talking about electing the president of the United States. ... I
don't know whether this is the influence of the media corrupting our
process or whether it's that personal ambition becomes a substitute for
our real focus on substance. ... All I'm sitting here listening to is
these two guys go on about their ads." Later, Keyes elaborates: "It's time
we began to ask ourselves why it is that these campaigns degenerate into
this kind of stuff. ... It's because [candidates] are trying so hard to be
all things to all people that they refuse to stand forthrightly and make
it clear on each given issue where they stand in a principled way and
simply speak the truth and let the chips fall. And so they get into this
spitting match over who did what to whom, as distraction from the lack of
substance in their own campaigns."

2. Campaign reform. Bush and McCain get into another argument over whose
campaign-reform plan is better. Again, Keyes injects an outside-the-box
perspective: "These folks sit here, two politicians, arguing about whether
or not the people of the United States should have under the First
Amendment the right peaceably to assemble and seek to petition the
government and seek redress of their grievances. ... Think about this:
[Politicians are] going to control our ability to fund those processes
through which we control their activities. And by controlling our funding,
I presume they will utterly destroy our First Amendment right. There
should be no such regulation by politicians of what we the people can do
in our own political process." Later, Keyes makes the same libertarian
point on health care. While his rivals embrace the idea of a right to
prescription drugs, Keyes points out that such rights often come at the
expense of other rights: "You have to be very careful, because if you say
that, then that means that somebody else, whether they're paid or not, is
obliged to provide that prescription drug."

3. Bob Jones. Under fire for speaking at South Carolina's Bob Jones
University without commenting on its policy against interracial dating,
Bush has argued that the speech illustrates his commitment to reach out to
all voters and lead them toward a more inclusive society. McCain,
meanwhile, has received credit for not speaking at Bob Jones. In the
debate, Keyes challenges both men: "Does leadership consist of going into
Bob Jones University, where serious questions, in fact, do exist about
religious bigotry and racial bigotry-going in, taking the applause,
risking nothing, because you refuse to raise the issues? That's what G.W.
Bush did. Or does it consist of getting on your high horse, refusing to go
talk to good-hearted Christian people, because you believed a bunch of
prejudicial slanders in the press, and then staying away-not even carrying
a message of integrity to them? Or does it consist, in fact, in going in,
carrying a message of truth and integrity about this country's moral
principles, and then looking them in the eye and saying, 'I'm a black
Roman Catholic Christian, married to an Indian-American woman. And if you
can't deal with the demons of racial bigotry and religious bigotry and
cast them out, you'll accomplish no good for this country'? Which is the
better leader? You tell me."

4. Abortion. Keyes argues that neither Bush nor McCain can defend the
GOP's anti-abortion position because each man is emotionally ambivalent
and logically inconsistent about it. In particular, McCain has said that
if his daughter were pregnant, he would leave the abortion decision
ultimately to her. Keyes asks both men what they will do "when Al
Gore ... or Bill Bradley looks you in the eye ... and says, 'Sen. McCain,
you said [that in the case of] your daughter, that would be her decision,
it would be up to her to decide. How on earth can you represent a party
that would take away from every other American woman what you would give
to your own daughter?' " McCain replies, "Do not bring, please, my
daughter into it. It's a family decision." Keyes pounces on the "family
decision" excuse, pointing out that it doesn't square with McCain's public
position: "That pro-life position applies to women who are daughters and
who are wives. We had better be able to stand before the American people
and justify what we stand for in applying to my daughter and your daughter
and everybody's daughter."

5. Taxes. Bush says he would cut taxes more than McCain because he "trusts
the people." Keyes replies, "If you're going to trust the people, then why
have this debate in which you have two [politicians] arguing over how
they're going to use their gatekeeper role to determine how much of your
own money you get to keep? That's what the income tax system does to
America." Instead of income tax, Keyes argues for a national sales tax.
It's a radical idea, but unlike Bush or McCain, Keyes makes it logically
consistent by insisting that sales taxes eventually be extended to the
Internet. Advocates of sales taxes on the Internet "are speaking for a lot
of people out there, working in the non-virtual marketplace, who are going
to look at it awfully strangely that they're operating a little store in
their town and they're going to be taxed, but somebody who goes out to the
Internet, once it is established, isn't going to be taxed. I see no
grounds for it," says Keyes. "We should treat it like any other business."

6. Clinton-bashing. After listening to Bush and McCain quibble over which
of them despises Bill Clinton more, Keyes points out that they're
embracing much of Clinton's agenda: "The rhetoric sounds good about ending
the Clinton era. S[But] I find it hard to believe one is going to end the
Clinton era by continuing his policies of 'don't ask, don't tell' in the
military, continuing his trade policies toward the World Trade
Organization ... [and] basically continuing federal domination of
education. ... We have folks calling themselves conservative all over the
map who are just going to continue the same junk we get from the Clinton
administration. What's the point of the label?"

And what does Keyes get for this dominant performance? "Bush and McCain
Collide Over Negative References," says the New York Times headline. Keyes
finally appears in the fifth paragraph-as a prop. ("With only Alan Keyes
sitting between them ...") The Los Angeles Times ignores him until the
seventh paragraph, which merely reports, "Former ambassador Alan Keyes,
who also participated in the debate, lags in the low single digits." In
the Washington Post ("Bush and McCain Clash"), Keyes doesn't appear until
the sixth paragraph. He is briefly acknowledged as "the most voluble of
the three candidates. But the focus was on Bush and McCain."

Why is the focus on Bush and McCain? Not because they won the debate on
style or on substance. Indeed, not because of anything that happened in
the debate. The focus is on them because it was on them before the debate
began. In short, the focus was rigged. And who controls the focus? The
same people who pass off "the focus" as an objective force that dictates
which candidates make the headlines and which don't. The media.

Yes, Keyes trails badly in the polls. Yes, he has no money.
Yes, many of his ideas are unconventional, to put it mildly.
But on the merits and on television, it's hard to imagine how any
candidate could have beaten his competitors more soundly than Keyes did
last night. In so doing, he removed any excuse reporters could have come
up with for ignoring him. Unless, of course, they had already made up
their minds.