Things in my state, Illinois, have gotten really interesting. The winner of the Republican primary to run for an open U.S. Senate seat took himself off the ticket because of revelations (made public primarily by a highly Republican newspaper, the Chicago Tribune), that he had taken his wife to sex clubs repeatedly, and tried to get her to perform sex acts in public. Personally, I thought he should have hung in there and run the race anyway. I think Republicans who go to sex clubs are bound to be more interesting than the run of the mill. But Republicans don't listen to folks like me much.

So the Repos began searching for a new candidate. They apparently could find no takers among the usual suspects among the Republican Party faithful, so they settled on erstwhile Presidential candidate, Alan Keyes. The good news, from the Republican point of view, was that Keyes is black, and since his opponent, Barak Obama, is also black, they figured (I guess) that they could take the race issue away from the Dems. The bad news is that Keyes does not now, nor has he ever, lived in Illinois. To compound the problems there, Keyes was one of the most vocal critics of Hillary Clinton when she moved to NY to run for the Senate there.

So what opinion do forum members have of the concept of carpetbagging in modern political life? Are we so mobile a society that it matters not where a person has lived in deciding how well he could represent any constituency? Or does residency matter? Your thoughts, please.

Joe B.