I spoke with AK, by phone, the day before the acceptance speech. What he said in public was what he said to me. At first he wanted to say no, then he thought about Obama's threat to the founding principles. He reflected on Lincoln's ordering of principles, and which ones were most fundamental, and slowly changed his mind. He prayed a lot over it, and reached a resolution. He is running to win, though he knows that will be hard.
Here is a link to the transcript of the full speech; I don't think it's been posted here yet.
http://www.renewamerica.us/archives/speeches/04_08_08illinois_announce.htm
Cheers,
Richard F.
Since Dr. Keyes said that, I believe him.
I don't claim to be a purist so it's good enough for me.
That's good enough for me. I wish every candidate could honestly say that!
Win or lose don't matter.
SEAN HANNITY, CO-HOST: Ambassador, what do you think about your opponent?
KEYES: Well, I thought, given all the hype, that there was some substance there. Today, however, after saying he wanted six debates, that he'd debate anybody that the Republicans put up, I'm told today he had a press conference, somebody told me now he wants to reduce it to two, ah, to four. I was just told it was two. He says and claims, and everybody claims, he has such national stature and ability. I step onto the scene, and he's running for the ropes at the side of the arena.
It seems to me we may have a situation here of all hype and no handle. We've got somebody who's like the Wizard of Oz in the famous picture: big head projected by the media, full of hype, sound, and glory, but when it comes down to it, he doesn't want to face the test.
HANNITY: Yeah.
"I mentioned slavery earlier. If you’re anything like me, you attended public schools for 13 years and somehow never learned that slavery ended peacefully in many countries just years before the Civil War. Of course, I come from Jersey, where even the Founding Fathers aren’t safe from revisionist school boards. But the point is, we ended one contradiction to freedom—slavery—with a series of further contradictions. Big Gov’t solutions, I mean, like military conscription, the suspension of habeas corpus, the silencing of presses, and the introduction of income taxes. So slaves are free now, and thank God for that, but 600,000 black and white Americans died in a war that, again, didn’t necessarily have to happen to bring slavery to its demise."And that’s not to say it wasn’t worth freeing the slaves. It was. But the same Big Gov’t that the Civil War gave us persists to this day, running schools that teach children—like yours truly, once upon a time—its one-sided view of said war. The point I’m trying to make here is that when we treat liberty irresponsibly, we create problems that threaten to destroy it. "