At his Christian Broadcasting Network blog, David Brody thinks that disgraced former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed has a promising future in mobilizing the religious right through his Faith and Freedom Coalition, launched earlier this year. Reed has his ground troops out in Virginia in support of Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell.
Common link: Pat Robertson founded the Christian Coalition. McDonnell attended Robertson’s university. Brody works for Robertson’s media operation. Perhaps his prediction is just a tad rosy.
Brody predicts, “This is just the beginning for the Faith and Freedom Coalition. Get ready to hear much more about them across the country as the midterm elections get rolling. And in 2012? Watch out. Call it a Brody File hunch but something tells me that Ralph Reed and his group are poised to be a MAJOR player. The key is always mobilization.”
Since Reed couldn’t even win the Republican primary to run for lieutenant governor of Georgia just three years ago, though, is he really a serious player?
After leading the Christian Coalition in the 1990s, Reed embarked on a political consulting and lobbying career, and promptly became embroiled in the notorious Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Although he was never prosecuted, his involvement in, among other things, double-crossing religious right groups in the service of making money for himself, Abramoff, and their tribal gambling clients, seriously damaged his political ambition when he ran for lieutenant governor in Georgia in 2006. From a contemporaneous report in the Washington Post:
At age 44, he still has the choirboy looks that have been noted in dozens of profiles over the past 20 years. But the first major dent in Reed’s carefully cultivated image came with the disclosure in the summer of 2004 that his public relations and lobbying companies had received at least $4.2 million from Abramoff to mobilize Christian voters to fight Indian casinos competing with Abramoff’s casino clients.
Similarly damaging has been a torrent of e-mails revealed during the investigation that shows a side of Reed that some former supporters say cannot be reconciled with his professed Christian values.
“After reading the e-mail, it became pretty obvious he was putting money before God,” said Phil Dacosta, a Georgia Christian Coalition member who had initially backed Reed. “We are righteously casting him out.”
Among those e-mails was one from Reed to Abramoff in late 1998: “I need to start humping in corporate accounts! . . . I’m counting on you to help me with some contacts.” Within months, Abramoff hired him to lobby on behalf of the Mississippi Band of Choctaws, who were seeking to prevent competitors from setting up facilities in nearby Alabama.
In 1999, Reed e-mailed Abramoff after submitting a bill for $120,000 and warning that he would need as much as $300,000 more: “We are opening the bomb bays and holding nothing back.”
I actually met Phil Dacosta at the Values Voters Summit in 2007. He was stumping for Mike Huckabee — and was furious at James Dobson et al. for dithering about backing him.
In the ultimate Reed takedown in the Nation in 2006, Bob Moser wrote:
When he announced his candidacy last spring, Reed figured that his biggest challenge would be winning over moderate, “party regular” Republicans who worried he might be too far right to win a general election. But the Abramoff scandal has forced him to fight for votes he should have been able to take for granted—especially those of Christian conservatives. . . . As executive director of the Christian Coalition from its founding in 1989 till his departure in 1997, Reed got—and took—the lion’s share of credit for transforming the politically unsophisticated evangelical right into a disciplined Republican Party machine.
But his ethical shenanigans changed that:
Last June Georgia’s former GOP House minority leader, Bob Irvin, blasted Reed in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed. “His M.O. is to tell evangelical Christians that his cause of the moment, for which he has been hired, is their religious duty,” Irvin fumed. “As an evangelical myself, I resent Christianity being used simply to help Reed’s business.”
Irvin’s dart went straight to the heart of the matter. While grassroots organizing has been the key to lifting evangelicals to power in the GOP, the movement’s political model has mostly mirrored the traditional hierarchy of churches, with trusted leaders setting the tone and issuing marching orders to their foot soldiers. What if the generals—the Reeds and James Dobsons—are proven to care more about power and money than stamping out abortion or homosexuality? The damage to evangelical politics would clearly be immense. So would the damage to the Republican Party, which cannot carry a national election without the full enthusiasm and participation of the evangelical troops.
With all the other religious right political mobilizers out there, it’s hard to believe that Reed will be either their poster boy or their get-out-the-vote go-to guy. Who that might be will become more clear over the next months and years. But I don’t think it will be Reed.
