Ralphie, We Hardly Knew Ye
by digby
So Ralph Reed, the darling prince of the Christian Right, top Bush administration advisor,ratfucker extraordinaire, coveted election night analyst and infamous college Republican couldn’t win the Republican primary for Lt Governor of Georgia. Wow. How the mighty have fallen. This was supposed to be his first step toward the presidency.
Reed has always been a phony and his criminal association with Abramoff finally brought him low. His Christian Right fans weren’t impressed with the fact that he was making millions promoting gambling and forced abortions. And they particularly didn’t like the fact that he refused to repent. (There’s a lesson in that, strategists, if you care to look.)
I think the thing I’ve always found most interesting about Ralph is the fact that he’s seen as a real evangelical when it’s quite clear that he became one purely for political reasons.
[In 1981]At the College Republican Natipnal Committee, Abramoff, Norquist and Reed formed what was known as the “Abramoff-Norquist-Reed triumvirate.” Upon Abramoff’s election, the trio purged “dissidents” and re-wrote the CRNC’s bylaws to consolidate their control over the organization. Reed was the “hatchet man” and “carried out Abramoff-Norquist orders with ruthless efficiency, not bothering to hide his fingerprints.” Abramoff promoted Reed in 1983, appointing him to succeed Norquist as Executive Director of the CRNC. (Nina J. Easton, Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Crusade, page 143)
In the spring of 1983, Reed was accused of rigging the election of ally Sam Harbren as his successor as president of the College Republicans at the University of Georgia. Promising a keg party, Reed recruited a number of new “members” to vote in the election, submitting their membership paperwork on the last night before the deadline for the election. The defeated presidential candidate, Lee Culpepper, wrote to the College Republican National Committee calling the election a sham. The CRNC investigated the matter, reprimanded Reed and ordered a new election. However, in the meantime, Culpepper “led an angry exodus” out of the UGA College Republicans and into a newly formed Young Republicans of Clarke County club. Harben admitted later, “We ran a dirty election.” (Nina J. Easton, Gang of Five, page 129–130)
Reed has said that, on a Saturday evening in September of 1983, he had a religious experience while at Bullfeathers, a upscale pub in Capitol Hill that is popular with staffers (and, to a lesser extent, members) of the House of Representatives. Regarding the experience, Reed said “the Holy Spirit simply demanded me to come to Jesus”. He walked outside the pub to a phone booth, thumbed through the yellow pages under “Churches,” and found the Evangel Assembly of God in Camp Springs, Maryland. He visited the next morning and became a born-again Christian. (Nina J. Easton, Gang of Five, pages 201–202)
In March 1985, Reed organized members of Students for America and College Republicans to picket the Fleming Center in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the nearby home of its founder, a Dutch-born doctor. Clinic staff reported that protestors “screamed epithets and intimidated patients with mock baby funerals.” Reed was arrested after bursting into the waiting room of the abortion clinic. He signed an agreement promising to stay away from the clinic and was not prosecuted. (Nina J. Easton, Gang of Five, page 205)
In 1989, Reed and Pat Robertson formed the Christian Coalition out of the ashes of Robertson’s failed presidential campaign.
Ralph has always been a sleazy Republican operative who pretended to be a Christian. The party’s full of people like him (Ann Coulter says she goes to church!) but he was the face of the Christian Coalition for many years so the revelation of his worldly corruption was particularly ruinous.
Oh, and by the way, Ralph has always had a lot of friends in high places. one of them is Joe Lieberman:
Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein and Republican strategist Ralph Reed were talking on the phone, shortly after announcing the launch of Stand for Israel, a campaign to mobilize Evangelical Christian political support for Israel.
Few political operatives have as much access to the White House these days as Reed, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party and former executive director of the Christian Coalition. But when Senator Joseph Lieberman phoned on the other line, Eckstein, 51, was happy to take the call from an old friend.
Old allies and pioneers in the push to build bridges with conservative Christians, Eckstein and Lieberman had not spoken since the senator’s ascension to the Democratic presidential ticket in August 2000.
“He said that he had just seen The New York Times piece about Stand for Israel, wanted to tell me how proud he was, and encouraged me to do more,” Eckstein told the Forward, recounting his conversation with Lieberman. “He also told me that, finally, after 25 years, my work has been vindicated.”
Joe and Ralph and the Rabbi had worked together in the past on a project called the Center for Christian and Jewish Values:
In 1994, when the ADL issued a scathing report blasting fundamentalist evangelicals, and Robertson’s Christian Coalition in particular, as a grave threat to Jewish life, Eckstein leaped to defend his allies. He convened a meeting in Washington between evangelical and Jewish leaders, and convinced the ADL’s director, Abe Foxman, to invite Robertson’s master tactician, Reed, to issue a call for reconciliation at ADL’s annual conference….According to Eckstein, “Reed made a wonderful impression.”
Eckstein capitalized on his successes by forming the Center for Christian and Jewish Values in Washington. Co-chaired by Orthodox Jewish Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., and evangelical Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., the now-defunct center, according to Eckstein, “brought together disparate groups to find common ground on issues of shared concern.” While Eckstein did bring people of different faiths under one roof, their ideological leanings were mostly uniform. The center was made up almost entirely of right-wing evangelicals like then Family Research Council director Bauer, Southern Baptist Convention executive director Richard Land and the dean of Robertson’s Regent University’s school of government, Kay James. (James is now director of the Office of Personnel Management under Bush.) Also involved were neoconservatives such as Abrams, William Kristol and William Bennett. The center was essentially a command post for the culture war.
I would imagine Joe felt a little frisson of fear tonight when he heard his old ally in the culture war went down in a primary. Ralph was a superstar of the conservative movement and plenty of people believed that he was headed for the white house.
Something’s in the air.
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