"If I get the nomination, I'll not only make a run for the presidency, I will at that moment have made history," he is saying.

But how will he make history?

"It's obvious," he says.

What is obvious?

"It's never been done before," he says. "It will be...the story of this election year." And he will go no further.

Ordinarily, Keyes, 49, avoids even such veiled references to his race, though he has spoken of it sometimes, particularly when he is explaining what he sees as the lack of respect given his candidacy.

"I find it a little bit annoying," he says. "Just because I think it's terribly important for me and the country that anything I do appeal to people as Americans, not on any racial, ethnic, or other basis, and I work very hard at that."

Keyes, an ambassador to the United Nations Social and Economic Council during the Reagan administration and radio talk show host, is a fierce opponent of abortion, and of gays in the military, and a fervent advocate of reinserting God into American public life. But he was not always this way.

"I was kind of a typical black American," Keyes says. "Democrat family, that kind of background."

But arriving at Cornell University in the late '60s, amid roiling social changes and student protests, changed him. When the African-American society, whose meetings he attended in his freshman year, voted to close down the campus, Keyes, already a champion debater, rose to oppose them. He did not sway them, however.

Keyes says he remembers identifying with the institution during that time, mystified as to why officials so easily caved in to the students.

Race is barely relevant to his version of the story. But his friend Marlo Lewis, with whom Keyes would later attend Harvard graduate school, tells it differently.

"He was taught when he was a little boy, `There are people out there who hate you for no good reason, so you can never give them any legitimate reason to hate you. People will claim you're stupid because of your skin color, so you had better be smart,"' Lewis says.

"Education was a lifeline, the one thing no one can ever take from you. Then he goes to college, and all these people are demonstrating in the name of civil rights and black power and they shut down the university, and he saw this as a betrayal."

But as Keyes will tell you, this was not his defining moment.

He is not one to talk of messy emotional moments, of the sort Lewis describes. This is a candidate who refuses to answer even innocuous questions about his personal interests and hobbies, because he believes it makes presidential hopefuls seem "like guests on the Jerry Springer show, which is incompatible with the dignity of politics."

He is profoundly annoyed by the high praise heaped on him for his oratorical skills because he thinks it implies a disregard for the merits of what he is actually saying.

He recently upbraided an audience of 1,000 party activists when they burst into applause during one of his speeches because he said they didn't really mean it.

For Keyes, a turning point in life is "an intellectual process, not an existential one." What changed him, he says, was enrolling in a class taught by Allan Bloom, who would later write "The Closing of the American Mind," which pilloried American universities for abandoning classical curriculums in favor of touchy-feely relativism and multiculturalism.

"I probably had the major transformation of my life in that period because I read Plato's Republic, and Rousseau," Keyes says. Bloom taught him to think, Keyes says, "And the more you think about things the more conservative you become."

It was also then that Keyes detached himself from his "typical" background.

"I don't know that my mother ever got used to it," he says. "She never understood how her baby became a Republican. My father grew more understanding. He voted for Reagan, though he never changed his registration."

There are plenty of people in the Republican party who are annoyed by Keyes, who still polls in the low single digits but makes his presence felt in debates. Former Republican National Committee chairman Richard Bond, who calls Keyes "belligerent, glib, and overbearing," wishes he would walk away from the race.

Keyes, who will not concede that his campaign is quixotic, pays no mind to such criticisms. As he sees it, he's in good company.

"It occurs to me,'' Keyes says, "that a man with the dignity and gravity and reserve of George Washington could not get elected today."