{"id":2288,"date":"2004-08-09T10:22:26","date_gmt":"2004-08-09T15:22:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/2288.html"},"modified":"2004-08-09T10:22:26","modified_gmt":"2004-08-09T15:22:26","slug":"hardly-a-ringing-endorsement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/hardly-a-ringing-endorsement\/","title":{"rendered":"Hardly a ringing endorsement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alan Keyes made it official yesterday, announcing his candidacy and offering the kind of sentiment<\/a> that captures the GOP’s perspective on this race: “I’m not going to stand here and with tremendous ease promise you a victory….”<\/p>\n

But to get a sense of what key national figures from Illinois, including, say, the Speaker of the House, think about this race, consider Dennis Hastert’s cringe-inducing comments on Meet the Press<\/a> yesterday.<\/p>\n

While describing Barack Obama as a “rock star,” Hastert went out of his way to let everyone know he played no role whatsoever in the Keyes selection.<\/p>\n

“Well, I tell you what, I was out of town when that happened…. I’ve been working for five weeks trying to find a candidate. Here we are.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hastert also all-but admitted that the state party was absolutely desperate and that GOP officials settled on Keyes as they hit rock bottom.<\/p>\n

“I spent five weeks trying to find good people…. You know, we were down — we needed to find somebody<\/i> to run, somebody who wanted to run. And, you know, Alan Keyes wants to run, and I hope he’s a good candidate.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They’ll probably be leaving this out of the Keyes-for-Senate TV commercials. Assuming there are Keyes TV commercials.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alan Keyes made it official yesterday, announcing his candidacy and offering the kind of sentiment that captures the GOP’s perspective on this race: “I’m not going to stand here and with tremendous ease promise you a victory….” But to get a sense of what key national figures from Illinois, including, say, the Speaker of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}