Ralph Reed Corruption Kills Career

CATEGORY: Ralph Reed Loses Election

TAG: Ralph Reed, corruption, election, loss

EDITORIAL: The Modern Evil Company regretfully announces the defeat of Ralph Reed in his bid for Lieutenant Governorship of Georgia. We have admired is unethical drive and hypocrisy for years. This time though his corruption came to the surface through his illegal deals with republican felon Jack Abramoff. Even raising the liberal bogeyman couldn't save Ralph again.

From all of us to you and your family, we hope that you consider another run for public office, Ralph. We suggest a "Swaggart Strategy" of public penance to brim your coffers and set you up for 2008. You have our support.

What Next for Ralph Reed?

Jul 22, 11:16 AM PT

WASHINGTON, July 21 — As a seasoned political strategist, Ralph Reed knew from the first returns on Tuesday night that the news was bad and even laughed at the television pundits who suggested that the race was still up for grabs.

But this time the loss he was assessing was not a client’s but his own first bid to win elective office — the lieutenant governorship of Georgia. It would have been the next big step in a seemingly unstoppable career that had already vaulted him to the head of the Christian Coalition at the age of 29, to the cover of Time magazine at the age of 33, and to the inner circle of President Bush’s political advisers by the age of 39.

His campaign had struggled for months to overcome the disclosure of e-mail correspondence between Mr. Reed and the lobbyist Jack Abramoff that suggested a mercenary streak at odds with Mr. Reed’s Christian image. When the evangelical newsmagazine World carried a series of reports on the subject, the accusations became impossible to dismiss as mere liberal media bias.

And from the first returns in the Republican primary, Mr. Reed knew that the suburban Atlanta precincts with the biggest megachurches, the conservative Christian strongholds essential to his campaign, had turned against him, friends who watched with him said.

“Our own publication did this hatchet job on him, and we lost that core base of people,” said his friend Tim Echols, founder of TeenPact, a Christian conservative youth group. “It was very hurtful to Ralph.”

Now, a dozen years after Time proclaimed him “The Right Hand of God,” some are preparing Mr. Reed’s political obituary, wondering what he will do after his rejection by the evangelical churchgoers whose support formed the foundation of his reputation as a political activist and his personal fortune as a political consultant.

“Ralph will have to totally reinvent himself,” said Matt Towery, a political analyst based in Atlanta who once worked as campaign chairman for Newt Gingrich.

Friends say it is too soon to write off Mr. Reed, who is now 45. Deal Hudson, a Catholic conservative who worked closely with Mr. Reed on the last two presidential campaigns and watched the returns with him in an Atlanta hotel suite, said Mr. Reed was already talking about how he might play a role in the 2008 race even on the night of his own defeat.

“We forget that there is nobody who is able to craft a message for religious conservatives better than Ralph Reed, and the ability to craft a message does not depend on Ralph Reed and how high his bona fides are,” Mr. Hudson said, noting that Mr. Reed could still work on direct mail, radio and television commercials, speeches and the like from behind the scenes.

In a telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Reed said he was proud of his campaign and glad that he had run. “I have been building the Republican Party and the pro-family movement for over 25 years, and I am looking forward to continuing that important work,” he said.

In his concession speech, Mr. Reed said he was not “not focused on being a candidate in the future.”

In the interview, however, he said, “First bids for elected office are always tough, and I am not the first person to lose a first campaign,” noting several examples, including Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida and Mr. Gingrich, who went on to become speaker of the House.

Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said Friday that he was sticking by Mr. Reed. In an e-mail message, he said Mr. Reed had “played a vital role” in building the party’s grass-roots networks in Georgia and around the country. He added, “I look forward to continuing to work with him and value his friendship.”

Mr. Reed has retained his communications and consulting firm, Century Strategies, which in the nine years since he founded it has enabled him to amass a net worth of $4.5 million, according to financial disclosure forms filed during the campaign.

It remains to be seen how the revelations about his ties to Mr. Abramoff will affect Mr. Reed’s relationships with Christian conservative candidates or leaders. A Senate committee’s investigation into Mr. Abramoff’s double-dealing with his Indian gambling clients determined that he had paid Mr. Reed’s firm more than $4 million to organize Christian opposition to new Indian casinos on behalf of tribes with casinos who hoped to avoid competition.

Mr. Reed, who says he opposes gambling as immoral, has maintained that he did not know the fees came from gambling proceeds. But e-mail disclosed by the Senate committee suggested that Mr. Abramoff did not keep it a secret.

In April 1999, for example, Mr. Abramoff e-mailed Mr. Reed to propose a direct payment to him from the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, a gambling client, without bothering to move the money through a third party. “Any chance that a wire from Choctaw directly would be OK?” Mr. Abramoff wrote.

In internal e-mail messages, Mr. Abramoff and his associates referred to Mr. Reed as an ideologue “as far as the cash goes.” In his own e-mail, meanwhile, Mr. Reed pressed for millions in payments and boasted of mobilizing prominent Christian conservatives to lobby government officials at his request. Many of those conservatives, including James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family, have publicly distanced themselves from Mr. Reed in recent months.

World, an influential evangelical magazine edited by Marvin Olasky, who helped Mr. Bush develop his “compassionate conservative” philosophy, concluded, “The portrait that emerges is one of a shrewd businessman who has spent years leveraging his evangelical and conservative contacts to promote the economic interests of his clients, rather than the principles of the political movement he once led.”

Some Republicans said the election results themselves had cast a new light on Mr. Reed’s past talk of turning out an “army” of grass-roots churchgoers. “For years, we have sat back and said, ‘O.K., Ralph, tell us again how you are going to turn out your army,’ ” said Mr. Towery, the Georgia political analyst. “But when it came to turning out his army for himself, they didn’t turn out.”

Pat Robertson, the religious broadcaster who founded the Christian Coalition, said in an interview last year that he considered Mr. Reed one of the most ambitious people he had ever known, suggesting that Mr. Reed had compromised his principles along the way. Many of Mr. Reed’s allies have suggested that his bid for lieutenant governor was to be a stop on a carefully plotted career path toward governor, senator or president.

Mr. Towery, who has known Mr. Reed since his days as a Senate intern, said that he and others tried to dissuade Mr. Reed from running while the Abramoff investigation was looming in the background, but that Mr. Reed was in a hurry.

“He felt that the timetable for his career could not be interrupted, and this was part of the timing,” Mr. Towery said.

About seven months ago, Mr. Reed began to respond more directly to the accusations about Mr. Abramoff, telling audiences that he regretted his involvement and had learned from the experience. “I am a better man and a better leader as a result,” he told a meeting of TeenPact, the Christian youth group. “God uses our mistakes to draw us closer to him.”

His contrition was not enough to win the race, but there were some signs that Georgia’s evangelical Christians might be willing to give him another chance. In the last days of the campaign, Clint Austin, a Christian lobbyist who had previously worked for Mr. Reed, circulated a public letter among Georgia Republicans explaining why he had turned against him over what he considered his deceptive tactics.

“It is time for Christians to confront and rebuke Ralph Reed, not make apologies for him,” Mr. Austin wrote. “If he truly repents (not just at election time), he can be a leader of unlimited potential.”