“I want to be invisible. I do guerilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.” –Ralph Reed, The Hill, December 17, 1997
I don’t know how I missed this last week, but I hope lots of people saw it: a blockbuster piece by Adele Stan on the return of Ralph Reed. One would have thought that his exposure as a cheap hustler taking advantage of Indian tribes and his decades long association with criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff would have been enough to chase him out of politics forever. But he’s baaack — in a big way with his new group, the Faith and Freedom Coalition:
The day after the election Barack Obama won by a wide margin, Reed says, he woke up feeling “like I’d been hit by a truck.” Speaking of the Obama campaign, Reed explains: “We were embarrassed. They ran circles around us.”
“I founded Faith and Freedom Coalition because I vowed that as long as I was alive, we were never going to get out-hustled on the ground again,” he told a group of activists earlier in the day…
Once again cloaked in the cape of a Christian crusader, Reed is back on the trail, doing what he does best: getting religious right-wingers to the polls.
Back at the Faith and Freedom Coalition gala, and with an eye to the media, perhaps, Reed issues what sounds like both a promise and a warning. “We’re not just playing around,” he says. “We’re not shadowboxing; we are playing for keeps. We’re playing for the most valuable prize in the history of the human race and that’s the United States of America — and we are not going to lose.”
Well, he’s not going to lose anyway…
“Hey, now that I’m done with the electoral politics, I need to start humping in corporate accounts! I’m counting on you to help me with some contacts.” — email to Jack Abramoff, 1998
For Reed, however, there’s likely another prize to collect, win or lose. It may be wrapped up in the old Red, White and Blue, but this prize comes in a distinctive shade of green. AlterNet learned that, in order to identify and make its 600,000 voter contacts in Wisconsin — many of them by text messaging and e-mail subscriptions — Faith and Freedom Coalition contracted with Millennium Marketing, a division of Century Strategies, a political consulting firm whose CEO happens to be Ralph Reed.
AlterNet contacted Billy Kirkland, FFC’s national field director, by phone on June 29 to inquire about FFC’s use of Millennium. “We did use them and they were a big help in Wisconsin,” Kirkland said. “It was one of those things where any time you can use a new technology to reach voters and educate voters on issues that are important to them — we’re trying to be on the forefront of that, so I’d be more than happy to respond by e-mail, but I’ve got a 4:00 [meeting] I’ve got to walk into.”
So I e-mailed him a few questions, including: “How much did FFC pay Millennium Marketing for what appears to be a broad array of services provided in the campaign against the Wisconsin recall?” At press time, he had yet to respond.
Hustlers don’t change their spots. And Ralph Reed has been hustling since the day he met up with Abramoff and Grover Norquist three decades ago. In fact,the modern GOP, with all it’s ideological extremism and corporate submissiveness is substantially what it is today because of that triad of youthful political con men who gathered together during the Reagan administration and made over the party in their image.
Do yourself a favor and read Stan’s entire article. Whoever said there were no second acts in American life didn’t know about the Republican Party.
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