Keyesian Revival? Not quite.

Being an educated American who's interested in politics and keeps up on current events, I thought I knew who all the presidential candidates were -- no matter how obscure. Hell, I even knew that John Cox has been in the race since March. But Alan Keyes? Alan M-Fing Keyes? Where the hell did he come from? And where did his beard go? And did he lose like 50 pounds or something? Keyes may be many things, but he's not a master campaigner if, by this week, he's only caught the attention of Americans like myself.

So when did Keyes start his quixotic run for president? Technically September, though he start pushing out feelers a month earlier, as TPM notes with a little irony: "Apparently there's a spontaneous grassroots movement to draft Alan Keyes into the GOP primary race -- oddly enough, the movement has emerged on Keyes' own website."

In the Keyes press release that TPM linked to, Keyes stipulates his conditions for undertaking another run at the White House: "Keyes — who in 2000 drew 14 percent in the Iowa Caucus and averaged 16 percent in his best ten states during the presidential primaries — says he is open to the possibility of running, if enough support exists at the grassroots for his candidacy." The aforementioned John Cox placed 11 in the Iowa Straw Poll, and Keyes..? Keyes didn't even have a place on the poll, since Cox came in dead last. So I guess Keyes sort of flip-flopped on his position about running for president.

And Keyes lack of support continues, unless you count the 2% he received in a Des Moines Register poll. I found three MySpace pages for Keyes, none with over 400 friends (the "official" Keyes MySpace page has 36 friends -- how lonely.) As for his website, there aren't many people on there if his forums are in any way indicative of the traffic he receives. His forums pages lists how many people are online. Obviously, this number varies every few minutes, but I haven't seen it peek over a hundred since I discovered his forums site a few hours ago. The super majority of those visitors are listed as "guests," not registered users. I know something about those guests -- most of them, I'm willing to bet, are spam bots. Judging from my experience administraing the domain of my former blog, loadedmouth.com, I can tell you that most of the time my site had at least a hundred "guests" online, but they weren't actual people. I know this because I had to manage thousands of spam comments flooding in each week from these "guests." So if 100 guests equaled five actual users online at loadedmouth.com (which it often did), the same equation works for Keyes's website, too. Which means that hardly anybody is reading it -- "hardly" in terms of the interest that a presidential candidate needs to generate, at least.*

As for his ballot access, I was surprised to learn that Keyes is on the ballot in 13 states. In four states, he bought his way onto the ballot; in other states, I assume he got signatures. Like iin Tennessee, where a candidate needs 275 signatures to get on the ballot; and Washington state, where is bar is set a bit higher at 1000 signatures. So, still, we're not talking any real popular support here.

So, thus far, that's the history of Keyes 2008 presidential campaign -- and I doubt there will be much more to add beyond this. After learning all of this, the question I've had since seeing Keyes in the debate still begs: what the hell was he doing there?

* - There's a possibility that my estimates on the people viewing Keyes website are wrong, If so, and if the number of "guests" are taken at face value as actual people, it's still not many people.