Republican Presidential candidate Alan Keyes challenged students to rebuild the nation's moral fabric in his speech yesterday -- just 20 hours before voting booths opened this morning for the critical New Hampshire primary.
Keyes spoke in Collis Common Ground before a group of about 200 students and College community members. For more than an hour, he drove home his message that America suffers from moral decay, not economic decline.
He said American culture has devalued the love that keeps families together and instead, emphasized the desire for wealth, status and power.
Keyes said he will continue to campaign even if his primary results are as poor as his 7 percent Iowa take.
During his speech, Keyes affirmed his anti-abortion and pro-family stance. He questioned the conservatism of his Republican opponents by attacking Patrick Buchanan's isolationism, Sen. Bob Dole's R-Kan. political ambition and Steve Forbes' "phony" abortion stance and flat tax proposal.
"The way to rebuild this country's moral fabric is right in your own life, choices and family," Keyes said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
He said students can be a part of moral change, addressing the issues of drug abuse and sex on campus.
"I challenge students to ask themselves what kind of a person you become when you allow your passions to control you and you don't control them," Keyes said.
"Are you fit to be a citizen in a free society?" he asked.
The real test of this country is whether Americans have the discipline the founding father's believed was essential to being a free people, Keyes said in his speech.
"Freedom can only survive so long as it is accompanied by self-control, self-discipline and responsibility," he said. "If we do not control ourselves, then someone will have to control us."
Keyes told The Dartmouth he has been a life-long Republican and suggested he would only consider running as an independent in the general election if the Republican party nominated a pro-choice candidate.
"If the Republicans nominate a pro-abortion type, I haven't left the party, the party has left me," he said. "Then, I'll do what I have to do to serve God and my country, because God, family, country, they come before party in my book."
He characterized the nature of the conflict between the GOP candidates in his speech.
"The battle of this primary is over the relationship between the conservative movement and the republican party," he said.
Keyes said Dole's and Forbes' conservatism paid lip service, but no serious attention to the country's moral decline. He called Dole and Forbes "money obsessed."
He said Buchanan's conservatism seeks to "legislate" morality and misses the fundamental premise of freedom, that citizens have a voluntary obedience to society's laws and moral constructs.
Buchanan's isolationist trade ideas would cut off a major source of jobs and income and would be detrimental to the lives of common people, he added.
"To try to pretend that major problems in this country right now are being caused by some economic crisis does not excuse the indifference being displayed by all of the Republican candidates in this race to the real crisis of this country," Keyes said.
America's real problem is the decline of moral character and self-discipline destroying the country's families, he said.
"Do you think these kids are joining these gangs because they have to pay a progressive income tax?" he said.
Keyes stressed that neither budget deficits, tax rates or a sluggish economy could be fully responsible for the nation's moral decline. He said he has visited people in third-world nations living in abject poverty while still maintaining a strong family life.
"Maybe they have in their hearts something that we are loosing -- a capacity to understand that your life is taken up by the needs, hopes and dreams other people," he said.
Keyes served as President Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the United Nation's Economic and Social Council, as Assistant Secretary of State for the International Organization Affairs, and as interim president of Alabama A&M University in 1991. He is presently a nationally syndicated call-in talk show host.
He was the seventh Republican presidential candidate to visit the College as part of the Rockefeller Center for the Social Science's presidential lecture series.
