VI. Grabbing a Senate Seat with a Little Help from his Trilateral Friends 245Ryan trailed Obama in early polls, with Obama opening up a 20-point lead after the media
reported that Ryan had assigned Justin Warfel, a Ryan campaign worker, to track Obama’s
appearances. Warfel followed Obama’s movements 24 hours a day, recording everything
Obama did in public on videotape. Warfel also heckled Obama by yelling questions at him in
public. Ryan eventually withdrew Warfel, but did not apologize. (Wikipedia on Ryan)^105THE CARPETBAG CAMPAIGN OF ALAN KEYES OF MARYLAND
It was now late June, and the Illinois Republican Party no longer had a credible candidate for the
United States Senate. At this point, given the typical Republican mentality and voter base, it would
have been natural for the Illinois Republicans to do the obvious thing and pick the best financed,
best known white candidate they could find in order to at least cut their losses. The normal
Republican reasoning would be that since Obama is black, a white candidate would automatically
acquire support from backlash voters, especially those in the rural areas of downstate Illinois. A
white candidate was the obvious choice. There was absolutely no reason to go far afield to recruit a
black candidate yet for some inexplicable (and probably Trilateral) reason, this is what the Illinois
Republicans did. Perhaps, after two of Obama’s opponents had been knocked out by perfectly timed
scandals, the Illinois GOP had detected the hand of Divine Providence and concluded that Obama’s
entry into the US Senate was now divinely ordained. Otherwise, there is no explanation of what the
Illinois Republicans did next. They went all the way to Maryland to recruit Alan Keyes, a former
State Department official under Reagan, a failed Senate candidate in his own state of Maryland, and
a former Republican presidential candidate who was widely thought to have run for the White
House in order to increase the standard fee he could demand for making lectures in front of groups
of reactionary students on college campuses. Keyes was a widely known windbag and buffoon, and
by making the trip from Maryland all the way to Illinois he compounded his problems by adding
carpetbagger and interloper to the list of epithets ready to be hurled against him.
In August 2004, with less than three months to go before election day, Alan Keyes accepted the
Illinois Republican Party’s nomination to replace Ryan. A long-time resident of Maryland,
Keyes established legal residency in Illinois with the nomination. Through three televised
debates, Obama and Keyes expressed opposing views on stem cell research, abortion, gun
control, school vouchers, and tax cuts. In the November 2004 general election, Obama received
70% of the vote to Keyes’s 27%, the largest electoral victory in Illinois history. (Wikipedia)^106
Obama had received an important boost from Laurance S. Rockefeller, a senior member of the
Rockefeller family, in the form of some very generous contributions to Axelrod and some issue ads
designed to favor Obama’s Malthusian party line. Laurance, along with David, was one of the
surviving members of the Rockefeller brothers’ generation, the sons of John D. Rockefeller Junior.
Laurance died at the age of 94 in July 2004, so the Obama campaign was one of his last projects.^107
OBAMA’S VOLKSGEMEINSCHAFT SPEECH
AT THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION
In the midst of these events, Obama was chosen by the party hacks and Wall Street operatives
who control the Democratic Party to deliver the keynote address of the 2004 Democratic national
convention in Boston, Massachusetts. This was an unmistakable symbol of the fact that Obama had
a support network that went far beyond the confines of the corrupt Chicago Democratic machine: it
reached to Wall Street and beyond. In an instant, the obscure mediocrity Obama became a national
and indeed international celebrity, and the Chicago Democratic wheel horses with whom he had