MORALIST ON THE MARCH

By RICHARD STENGEL/SEATTLE

Alan Keyes' one-word cure-all for America's problems probably sounds a lot like your grandmother's: marriage. On a recent summer morning in Oxnard, California, while towheaded children scampered in the sun, a grim-faced Keyes lectured their parents. "The No. 1 challenge of our life as a people," he railed from the podium, "is restoring the principle of the two-parent, marriage-based family." The moms and dads in the audience applauded. "And how do you get people to marry?" he asked, a grandfatherly smile creeping across his face. "Nagging has a lot to do with it."

By his own reckoning, Alan Keyes, the first-ever black Republican candidate for President, is not running to win; he is running to raise the moral level of the debate. And the debate, as far as he's concerned, is not about Bosnia or balanced budgets or even welfare reform; it is about a "corrupt concept of freedom," a kind of national selfishness that he claims has perverted the dream of the Founders. From that debased vision comes not only the epidemic of single mothers and out-of-wedlock births, but what to him is the epitome of licentiousness: abortion. His harping on abortion increases pressure on his opponents to do the same--something they would rather avoid.

In the culture wars of the 1996 campaign, Keyes is the most ferocious--and eloquent--soldier of the right. While his supporters paint him as a black Ronald Reagan, he is in fact the anti-Jesse Jackson, a silver-tongued moralist who preaches a single-minded, theologically tinted conservative message. Though Keyes registers less than 2% support in national polls of Republican voters (he came in fifth in last week's Iowa straw poll) and has a ramshackle organization, he has emerged as one of the campaign's most compelling--and curious--figures. He is , first of all, a political oxymoron, a black Republican ("The Invisible Man" is how he describes his life in the G.O.P.); a Harvard Ph.D. with a daily three-hour populist talk-radio show; and a black Roman Catholic whose principal appeal is to white Evangelicals.

At well-attended rallies around the country, Keyes dissects the meaning of the Declaration of Independence and finds in it an antiabortion message. "We are endowed by our Cre-a-tor," he says, stringing out the syllables for effect, "not by evolution or by bureaucrats, with certain unalienable rights." Unalienable, he says with professorial precision, means "they cannot be taken from us." "Our freedom and our life come from God," he says--and legalized abortion rips away that life and freedom.

The true meaning of the Declaration, he asserts, was distorted by another American scourge: slavery, which he considers the moral equivalent of abortion. "Slavery is not an academic point to anyone like me," he says. "And I will defend the unborn just as I would have fought against slavery." It was precisely this apocalyptic message, which he articulated in a bravura eight-minute speech at a New Hampshire candidates' cattle show last February, that sparked his support among conservative Christians, as like-minded radio hosts around the country replayed his speech.

Intense, cerebral and self-contained, Keyes shies away from the flesh pressing of campaigning. In his dark suits and monogrammed, French-cuffed shirts, he resembles the cool international diplomat he once was. At the Seattle airport, carrying his own bag over his shoulder, his head buried in a computer magazine, he is asked whether he is enjoying the campaign. "Enjoyment would be too strong a word," he says with a half-smile, half-grimace.

The fifth child of a career noncommissioned officer (and lifelong Democrat), Keyes grew up in Georgia, Italy, Virginia, Texas and Maryland, which eventually became his home. A precocious orator, he won various speaking contests as a boy. At Cornell in the 1960s, he was revolted by the counterculture and ardently supported the Vietnam War. After earning a Ph.D. in government at Harvard (his dissertation was on Alexander Hamilton), he went into the foreign service, becoming a desk officer in Bombay, where he met his wife Jocelyn, an Indian with whom he has three children. With the helping hand of Jeane Kirkpatrick, Keyes rose to become ambassador to UNESCO. On the campaign trail he is "Ambassador Keyes."

Like many on both the left and right, Keyes sees a breakdown in civic life in America. The reason, he emphasizes again and again, is that "we have embraced a concept of freedom based on whatever's good for you, that's what you do." But Keyes' remedy appears to be restoring a Norman Rockwell America that never really existed. "End welfare and turn it over to the churches that once did the job right," he says. He even seems to romanticize "the peculiar institution," telling an overwhelmingly white audience at the exclusive Rainier Club in Seattle, "Even during slavery the family structure of black America was stronger than it is today."

Keyes notes that his only campaign experiences, two losses when he ran, in 1988 and 1992, for a Maryland U.S. Senate seat, hardly provide much of a launching pad for the presidency. But campaigning for him is a way of practicing what he preaches. "The American Dream," he says urgently, "is not just about getting a nicer car or a bigger house." And the American presidential race is not just about getting votes.

--With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington