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We’re all nervous for her, so it’s hard to see how well she did.

She was great.

Anyone can see that they chopped the tape to interrupt her impressive presence.

Go Sarah.

Don't worry, they're too late: Benedict XIV died in 1758.

This lady doesn't sound like such a sweetheart herself.

No, he's just saying that Kerry could easily have demagogued it that way.

transcript's done and being proofed - up tomorrow on renewamerica.us

Not true. He's said it for years. It came up this time, not because Keyes brought it up, but because the press found it in old speeches.

Here's an answer Keyes gave to a GOPAC high-dollar donor question in 1995. I think it shows what Keyes thinks debates are for, and why Obama is running for cover.

Question: Your rhetoric was rather profound, and certainly your presentation charismatic and inspirational. However, to characterize those of us who may not believe in right-to-life--I do, but for those others who do not--as tolerating an evil, when the evil is only definition of a few of us, this destroys our coalition. And the only way this coalition can lose the next election, the presidential election, is by making this a divisive issue and having it on the platform.

Keyes: You know the sad thing? You guys are fooling yourselves. I am not putting this issue on the table for you--you understand this? I have nothing to do with this. It is not my doing; it is not your doing. It is not the doing of anybody out there that this issue is on the table before the American people.

Struggle with it all you like. The truth of the Declaration burdens this country. It's our thing we gotta carry. And we either carry it to glory, or we carry it to perdition, but we cannot lay that burden down.

And you may wish to! But look back at your history. You stand in a tradition of those who did not wish to face up to the need of racial justice.

You stand in the tradition of those who did not stand up to the need to fight the institution of slavery. The same points were made! The same arguments were made! "We can't touch this, it's divisive, it'll destroy the Union, it'll tear the country down!"

And the same voice of conscience was sounded in every generation, at every point. We either believe in those principles, we reason consistently from those principles, or we don't survive as a free people.

And I am not making that dilemma for you. That is a dilemma that the Founders set before us when they penned those original words, and when they took out of our hands the judgment as to whether or not we got to abuse one another's human life. We do not have the right to abuse one another's lives. That has been taken away from us by God, our Creator.

I am not saying that. The Declaration says that. I have the right in every generation, in every party, in every quarter on every corner of this nation to state the words of that Declaration and demand that you either put up or shut up!

And I'll tell you, I'm doing it now. It was done by others in the past. And as long as this republic survives in freedom, it will be done every time in every generation. 'Cause I'll tell you, you call this the "pro-choice" issue, but where this issue is concerned, my friends, you've got no choice. You are going to face the argument, and you're going to get the better of it in terms of the logic of our heart and our mind, or you're gonna lose.

Because I'm not gonna leave it alone. And other just and decent people in this country are not gonna leave it alone, because I'm gonna stand up and make the argument from principle. And I'm gonna make it better than you can, because I believe I have the truth on my side. And if you disagree, then get up here and make a better argument! And we'll go before the American people, because that's all I propose. We'll go before the people of this country, and I'll make my argument, you make your argument, we'll both look at the Declaration, and we'll see where the chips fall. But it's going to be done.

http://www.renewamerica.us/archives/index.htm

Hi,

Source for state tax is private conversation with top Keyes aide - and published reports saying the same thing. I don't have those at hand.

The source for the presidential campaign debt info is, again, private conversation with top Keyes aide over the course of years of close work with that aide and Dr. Keyes himself, throughout the period of the campaigns and after. No, I did not have a position in finance at the national level, but was treasurer of the California campaign in '96. I have been involved chiefly as an advisor to Keyes (not that he takes much advice!) and, more often, to his chief of staff. I also have written lots of the campaign material, drafted public statements, etc.

Let me repeat, though, that I am not claiming close knowledge of the campaign debt, but reporting what I remember being told several times by the person who has heroically supervised the decade-long attempt to keep the shoe-string Keyes operation in conformity with the absurd, servile, Byzantine, tyrannical and arbitrary FEC dance. The burden on a grass roots effort under media scrutiny to keep in close conformity with FEC diktats is overwhelming, and in our case it ended up draining the time and energy of our most talented national staff, because we never had money to hire the kind of professionals that the establishment candidates could afford. I think that the actual situation is that much of the remaining debt is deferred salary to the key person who spent most of her highly skilled professional time FOR YEARS filling out FEC forms to the detriment of the campaign itself. The FEC requires grassroots campaigns to have professional quality bookkeeping, and now the expenses of that bookkeeping, deferred at the time because there was much more important stuff to spend donations on, are left on the books as "campaign debt" of which the FEC demands continual monitoring

The final absurdity is that, as suggested in my first post, simple forgiveness of such debt is not only not allowed -- it is a serious violation of campaign finance law. Think about it - if I give a candidate some good or service, worth scores of thousands of dollars, and say that I will take "deferred payment," and then forgive that debt, I have in fact made a contribution scores of times greater than the maximum campaign donation limit.

Again, I don't plan on defending the factual truth of all this - I'm not with the Keyes organization officially now, and will let them answer this question as they choose. These are my personal opinions based on long and close experience with the campaigns.

The state tax bill, according to Keyes folks, was the result of an error in categorizing income between personal and corporate, and reduced to under $200 when that error was corrected. That amount was paid last week.

I believe that much or all of the campaign debt has been characterized as salary to senior campaign staff, not debt owed to external vendors, etc. I suspect that, from what I know of Keyes senior staff, this means that the debt mostly represents years of salary to Keyes' top couple of people, who worked without receiving pay during most of the presidential campaign years, because they weren't in it for the money and could fortunately afford not to receive it. Without such generous people, there would have been no campaign. Due to our beloved campaign finance laws, such debt can't be forgiven - that would be an illegal contribution - and must be carried just the same as bills from outside vendors. But it is not true that the presidential campaign debt consists of legions of unpaid and long-demanded bills. I believe that claims the campaign debt was "settled" refer to all the remaining vendor bills, etc.

Again, I don't know all this for sure, but believe it is substantially true. If it is not true, we will no doubt eventually see articles about the starving children of printers and hotel owners ruined by the Keyes campaign.

I offer all this as a caution against taking these numbers at face value. The FEC system is not a friend of grass-roots conservative political campaigns.

On Sunday, I expect Keyes will give a full explanation of his thinking about the "carpetbagger" question. I'm sure it won't satisfy those for whom any stick is good enough to beat him. But it should satisfy those with honest reservations about when candidates from other states are justified in running for the senate - because Keyes remains as strong as anyone in his commitment to the federalist principle. But he also understands the meaning and purposes of that principle. I suggest that we all just wait until we can read his remarks on Sunday. Better yet, it would be interesting to try to anticipate his reasoning. I promise you, he won't duck the question.

Keyes has never advocated illegal immigration, which an accurate reading of the column you link would show you.

Richard, I have spent some time trying to find words to describe this thread, and I give up. There is a motivation at work in the DiLorenzo/GOPCapitalist camp that makes them apparently incapable of rational judgment when it comes to Lincoln and the surrounding issues. It is seen most clearly when texts which are offered as prime evidence are shown to be nothing of the kind. Normally, this would slow a person down. But here, it doesn't. DiLorenzo is the ruling spirit of this weird pluck, but his disciples are apparently ambitious as well.

As I say, I don't know how to describe verbal interchange with such people. It's like going into the ring and fighting Joe Frazier -- you argue with him and he uses his gloves. Arguing with DiLorenzo is like being attacked with fallacy-shrapnel. I've had enough.

Here. Just for you. A passage from a real book on Lincoln, pausing to reflect on the period just after his election. The problem that you guys have is that any serious and sustained exposure to the actual words and deeds of Lincoln make passages like this increasingly undeniable.:

"So there was this Illinois lawyer -- from the point of view of official Washington, an inexperienced man from the provinces whom no one knew -- suddenly and rather astonishingly elevated to the highest post in the land. And his election would precipitate the nation's worst crisis.

"What qualities would this man bring to the high post in this time of peril? He would begin to exhibit his magnanimity, as well as his shrewdness, already now in the choosing of his cabinet -- particularly when that choosing was really completed, after ten tumultuous months of his presidency.

"Lincoln's suppression of any resentment toward Judd, Trumbull, and Palmer was an early sample of a mode of conduct that was becoming characteristic; his praise of General Taylor for not seizing an opportunity for revenge showed that this was a matter of reflection on his part. In the years to come he would make explicit reference to avoiding malice and to not seeking revenge and to not planting thorns often enough both in public speeches and in private letters, both in informal comment and in formal orders, to indicate that it was a settled conviction. He had thought or was thinking about the matter sufficiently often, and sufficiently deeply, for the words and ideas to come to his pen and his lips repeatedly and to be reflected in his deeds repeatedly.

"Leonard Swett would say it well, in an interview with Herndon in 1866, after the whole story of Lincoln's presidency had been told:

He [Lincoln] was certainly a very poor hater. He never judged men by his like, or dislike for them. If any given act was to be performed, he could understand that his enemy could do it just as well as any one. If a man had maligned him, or been guilty of personal ill-treatment and abuse, and was the fittest man for the place, he would put him in his Cabinet just as soon as he would his friend. I do not think he ever removed a man because he was his enemy, or because he disliked him.

"This virtue would be particularly notable in an active and aspiring person seeking both to rise himself and to accomplish great and controversial objects in an arena of nation-shaking conflict over power, policy, and philosophy, in which the process itself necessarily casts up both personal and factional adversaries -- to most of us, enemies.

"Lincoln's generosity of spirit would be joined, in a combination difficult to put together, to great resolution, strength of will, "executive force," as William Seward himself would one day call it. That virtue too would begin to be evident to the nation in the months after his election, as we will see. Charitable persons are not always strong-willed or resolute; forcefully resolute persons are often not particularly generous, charitable, magnanimous. This new man who would become the president of the United States would, to the astonishment someday of the world, be both. How? First of all, by a clarity of mind that sorted matters wisely. We know that he had a good mind -- a good political mind. But that is not enough: His "ego," as we call it now, did not distort his good mind's working. His considerable self-confidence not withstanding, he would achieve a detached and proportionate sense of himself in relation to an unflinching measure of the scope and meaning of the enormous human drama that confronted him. His self did not get in the way.

"Generous, charitable people who pardon simple soldier boys who fall asleep on sentry duty and forgive enemies may just be dodging difficult decisions, indulging a softness in themselves. These resolute politicians, on the other hand, with their self-sympathizing insistence on how hard their decisions are, how tough they have to be, may just be giving rein to proud self-assertion. One does not perceive in Lincoln that either his generosity or his resolution was self-indulgent -- or was an occasion for self-congratulation. One of his great statements as president - which adds something even to the Second Inaugural Address -- was his saying in passing in a letter to a Louisiana Unionist on July 28, 1862, "I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing." Too vast for anything merely personal, we might also say.

"We observed about that youngster reading his books and discovering htat his abilities were greater than those of anyone else in Pigeon Creek, and writing his name and imagining his future distinction, that the combination of his life story with the great power of the wartime presidency might create a moral monster, a tyrant indeed. But that did not happen. His ego would not be stoked and enlarged by his rise from nowhere all the way to the supreme position, or inflated by the immense power that he held when he got there.

"On the contrary. The higher he went and the greater his power, the worthier his conduct would become -- something like the opposite of Lord Acton's dictum. More notable even than young Lincoln's rise to eminence from unpromising beginnings would be the fact that the rise would not corrupt him, but something like the reverse."

You are very patient Richard. It's worth doing. But I am tired of arguing with rocks.

The triumphant presentation of that long list of pathetic examples of Lincoln's perfectly ordinary and boring support of a moderate tariff from the 1840's, and the complete lack of any quotations even of that sort from after 1852, kind of sums it up. How do you argue with people who refute themselves, fail to notice, and then insult you?

Perhaps we should begin to post, in reply to this kind of static, more edifying and therefore inflammatory texts from and about Lincoln. I'm going to find a nice long passage from Miller that I read tonight.

I think that presenting this letter as damaging to the position that Lincoln was honest, wise, and understood that economic issues are subordinate to moral ones, is about as complete a self-refutation as you could manage.

I think that the archives of politicians over the centuries might be searched for quite a while to find another example of a politician telling supporters quietly that he thought a crucial policy should be let to lie until their opponents decided it was time to talk about it again. And this is only one of several such gems of prudent moderation contained in this confidential letter.

The use of this letter as a proof that Lincoln had a base and hidden agenda is, to me, rather a proof that this discussion is impossible. Any stick is apparently good enough to hit Lincoln with, and any hypothesis plausible, save only that he said what he meant and meant to save just self-government.

Just in case you haven't heard this point before -- Lincoln's words here are completely consistent with everything he said and did. He believed that, as long as the moral foundations of the Republic were secure, economic issues were the proper subject of political debate. For most of his political career, the moral foundations of the Republic were fairly secure. That meant that slavery was contained, and in course of ultimate extinction. When that changed in 1854, the priorities of any just statesman dictated that he make the containment of slavery his primary focus. Lincoln, in this letter, acknowledges that his basic support for a moderate tariff is unchanged, and that --notice-- when NATIONAL political agreement on that point is reached, he thinks it would be a GOOD THING for the COUNTRY. This is the only subject on which his correspondent has asked his opinion. The letter, to any literate person, says NOTHING about the relative importance of the tariff to other political questions Lincoln might consider, as such other questions are not the subject of the letter.

He elsewhere makes it perfectly plain that economic issues are wholly secondary to the preservation of the Union on the terms of the Declaration. His complete SILENCE on economic issues from 1854-1860, except on the rare occasion when someone asked him about them, is entirely consistent with the obvious judgment, expressed in scores of speeches, that the containment of slavery was a question on which hung the possibility of just self-government. The political cooperation of pro- and anti-tariff Northerners in the Republican Party is just one of a boatload of indications that -- duh -- the Lincoln political movement was really about the containment of slavery -- for the SAKE of preserving a Union devoted to just self-government.

What possible detraction from any of this is represented by this letter?

Just like liberals.....can't even complete a thought, without trying to get into the federal Treasury.

Like moths to the light . . .

or rebs to a chance at self-parody.

Oh, you caught me again. We Whigs are so clumsy.