Keyes a Hit at UVSC By STEVEN GARDNER The Daily Herald

OREM -- Alan Keyes may have proven Wednesday night that no conservative candidate for president should ever quit running until speaking to a Utah County audience.

Keyes, solidly in third place in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, spoke to a UVSC McKay Events Center audience he called the largest Keyes assembly ever.

"Praise God," he said as he began his speech, and God was the focus for the night. Keyes said the United States is in the middle of the most dangerous crisis ever, because the nation is unwilling to acknowledge God.

"Without faith there is no freedom. Without God there is no liberty," he said to an audience that may have found it refreshing to be able to applaud even when the speaker was invoking God's name.

Keyes is a Harvard Ph.D., a former ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, a former assistant secretary of state and two-time senate contender in Maryland.

As of Tuesday, Keyes had picked up 12 delegates toward the nomination. That puts him 559 behind George W. Bush and 213 behind John McCain.

But Keyes and his followers showed little sign of giving up. Before the speech, campaigners were passing a petition objecting to a law that will only allow Republican and Democratic presidential nominees in national debates.

And one audience member held a sign up reading, "Buchanan-Keyes 2000."

The speech was the first of two Republican addresses in two days at UVSC facilities. Bush is scheduled to appear at UVSC's Provo Airport hangar at about 1 p.m. today.

In most states so far, Keyes has drawn 3-4 percent, but Utah's vote should go more his way. Some at the rally said they would vote for Keyes Friday as a symbolic gesture, but many were diehards.

Minnesota was an exception on Super Tuesday. It was the one race in which Keyes came in second place, gathering 20 percent of the vote in a state that elected Jesse Ventura as its governor.

Keyes is anti-abortion, anti-income tax and anti-big government.

He said income tax is a "pillar of communism." He chastised politicians who talk about giving surplus money back to taxpayers as if it were a favor. "What is it exactly they're giving you? Your own money," he said.

"They talk about it as if it's our warm, fuzzy aunt who's come to take care of us," he said, adding that the difference is when the aunt asks for help, if you say "no" she has to go to someone "less hard-hearted" than you.

"The heart of government is coercion," he said.

Keyes told the story of how a young woman in South Carolina asked him why he favored the rights of potential people over actual people, a question he said could have come from the mouth of Hitler's propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

He criticized President Bill Clinton's integrity, but also criticized Republican leadership in the Senate for lacking "the integrity to perform its duty" and remove him.

"They left Bill Clinton in a job he never should have had," he said.

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This Story appeared in The Daily Herald on Thursday, March 9, 2000