If anyone thought that Alan Keyes was going to start marching around Illinois spouting clownish bombast and giving Barack Obama a chance to play the statesman in the face of the Illinois GOP's cynical nonsense, boy do they have another thing coming.

Today Keyes attacked Obama for taking the "slaveholder's position" by voting against a ban on late-term abortion which had no exception for protecting the life of the mother.

"I would still be picking cotton if the country's moral principles had not been shaped by the Declaration of Independence," Keyes said. Obama, he said, "has broken and rejected those principles -- he has taken the slaveholder's position."

When asked about the "slaveholder" comment, Obama told the AP that Keyes "should look to members of his own party to see if that's appropriate if he's going to use that kind of language."