CHICAGO, Sept. 21 (UPI) -- Illinois' Republican U.S. Senate candidate Alan Keyes wants to ban all political polls.
The Maryland conservative trailed Democrat Barack Obama by 45 points in a recent poll and has not yet gotten an Illinois driver's license.
Illinois gives new residents a 90-day grace period to obtain a driver's license after moving to the state, which means Keyes -- who became a legal resident in August -- won't have to get a new license until after the election.
"I haven't even opened a bank account," Keyes told the Bloomington Pantagraph.
The candidate has been tooling around central Illinois in a $500,000 Gulf Stream Tour Master and has not spent much time in the second-floor apartment he rented in Calumet City, south of Chicago.
"I've been too busy moving around," said Keyes. "I have not had the time. I barely have time to do my laundry."
Keyes's uphill battle against Obama has been defined by controversy. Facing a 68 percent to 23 percent deficit in the latest poll conducted by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and KMOV-TV, Keyes said political polls should be banned.
"They (polls) are manipulative and degrading and damaging to our political system, and they should not be allowed when it comes to the actual time frame in which people are making up their minds," he said.
Media-driven horserace analogies that use polls to determine who is ahead and who is behind at any given moment in a race have become an expected part of U.S. campaigns, but Keyes says the entire process is biased.
"I would suggest that what would be appropriate is a complete ban on all polling activity and all publication of such polling activity within a certain time frame," Keyes told the Pantagraph's editorial board. "All the polls taken at this stage of the game are phony anyway."
The conservative talk-show host promised to run a non-traditional campaign when he signed on to replace primary winner Jack Ryan as the GOP Senate nominee, and his first month certainly lived up to his announced game plan of actively seeking free publicity.
Keyes told about 20 Republican donors he plans to make inflammatory comments every day until Nov. 2.
"This is a war we're in," a Chicago Tribune source reported Keyes said at the 40-minute closed-door meeting with potential contributors. "The way you win wars is that you start fires that will consume the enemy."
Earlier this month Keyes made newscasts by saying Jesus would not vote for Obama because of Obama's support for abortion rights.
"Christ would not vote for Barack Obama because Barack Obama has voted to behave in a way that is inconceivable for Christ to have behaved," Keyes said in one of his most controversial comments since moving to Illinois.
However, Keyes denied calling Obama a "terrorist" in a statement that likened abortion to terrorism.
Obama, who has been running a front-runner's campaign seeking to avoid mistakes, was not interested in biting on Keyes' provocative rhetoric, but he couldn't resist responding.
"I don't want to just win," Obama said. "I want to give this guy who is running against me a spanking."
Keyes retorted that Obama's use of the word "spanking" was "the language of the master who, when he is displeased with the slave, gives him a whipping." Early on, Keyes compared Obama's position favoring abortion as being that of a "slaveholder."
"He has voted three times against a ban on live-birth abortions," Keyes said.
Both candidates are black and both earned advanced degrees from Harvard, but expectations for issue-oriented debates are waning because of Keyes's decision to make gay marriage and abortion the centerpiece of his campaign.
Republican moderates are dumbfounded.
Keyes left conservatives perplexed last month when he called for an income-tax amnesty for blacks "for one or two generations" as reparations for descendants of African-American slaves. Conservatives winced again when Keyes said Vice President Dick Cheney's gay daughter was a "selfish hedonist" by definition during the Republican National Convention.
With a huge 45-point lead, Obama knows he has little to gain by trading verbal barbs with Keyes. Keyes stumped in Bloomington-Normal a day after Obama skipped a Sunday afternoon debate sponsored by the Illinois Forum at the Champaign City Council Chamber that would have included all four Illinois U.S. Senate candidates.
Obama said he had received between 30 and 50 requests to attend debates and couldn't go to them all. The two candidates will face off in October.
Keyes used his visit downstate to meet with employees at State Farm and Mitsubishi and told a Bloomington fundraiser that Obama's record of supporting higher taxes and fees is bad for business in Illinois.
"His record of support for increased taxes, increased fees, the programs of Gov. (Rod) Blagojevich have created the worst, most hostile environment to business that we have ever seen in this state's history. If you want to have jobs, Senator Obama, stop killing our businesses," said Keyes.
Keyes has made no attempt to make bipartisan friends in Democrat-dominated Illinois. He tweaked Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley in a speech to the non-partisan Civil Federation last week by likening Daley's political machine to "the troll under the bridge" that must be fed before anyone else eats.
"I think there has been a tendency in politics for us to get into a situation that's like the old story of the troll under the bridge," he said. "We have a future, but we're not going to be allowed to get to that future because a troll is sitting under a bridge, saying, 'I eat first.'"
Daley chucked and said Keyes was so new to the state he probably didn't know where the airport was.
Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, the one-term Republican maverick who did not seek re-election, supports Keyes and blames Illinois Republican Party Chairwoman Judy Baar Topinka for the turmoil in the state GOP that led to the talk-show host being brought in from out of state.
Fitzgerald thinks Ryan should have remained the party's nominee despite the furor over sex-club allegations in unsealed custody documents in his divorce from television actress Jeri Ryan.
"The reason he (Ryan) left was because State Party Chairman Judy Baar Topinka forced him out," Fitzgerald told The Southern Illinoisan. "There was no reason for Jack Ryan to leave. Seventy-five percent of the people did not want him to leave."
Fitzgerald called Keyes a talented man who was right "on most issues" but said he may also be misunderstood.
"I think Alan Keyes is a brilliant public speaker, but he doesn't necessarily speak in sound bites, which leaves him vulnerable if there is a reporter who wants to be a little bit unscrupulous and take what he said out of context."
Fitzgerald said importing Keyes shows there are two completely different wings of the Republican Party: "those who are in politics for the reason of principle and those who are in politics for the reason to make money."
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