Eleven million people in Illinois, and the GOP couldn't come up with ONE person who actually lived there to run against Obama?
By bringing in Keyes, the GOP has elevated Obama's stature in the eyes of the left.
The real problem is they couldn't find one qualified person with a squeaky clean personal history to run against Obama. To run as a Republican these days, you need to have a squeaky clean "eagle scout who married young" type of background, without a lot of old girl friends and certainly no extramarital affairs or drug use. Every Pubbie knows the liberal media is out to roast him/her and will stop at nothing to find dirt, as we saw with Jack Ryan. I thought it was despicable for the AP to sue to unseal Ryan's divorce records, and I have no idea why any judge granted this request (except that the Judge might have been afraid of all those DNC operatives.) There are a lot of people who would like to run for the US senate, but they don't want every day of their lives to be investigated and written up by a##hole democrat journalists. We really have to start finding more folks with squeaky clean backgrounds and persuade them to become Pubbie politicians. It's a new calling in life.