Pharisee of the Decade
Ralph Reed:

[A]s he completes his journey from Christian advocate to professional politician, [Ralph] Reed, 43, finds himself carrying some baggage: his ties to an old friend, the Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

In Washington, federal investigations of Mr. Abramoff, a close ally of Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, have revealed that Mr. Abramoff paid Mr. Reed's consulting firm more than $4 million to help organize Christian opposition to Indian casinos in Texas and Louisiana - money that came from other Indians with rival casinos.

Mr. Reed declined to comment for this article; he has said publicly that he did not know that casino owners were paying for his services and that he has never deviated from his moral opposition to gambling. But the episode is a new blemish on the boyish face that once personified the rise of evangelical Christians to political power in America.

Some of Mr. Reed's past patrons - including the Rev. Pat Robertson, the Christian broadcaster who set Mr. Reed on the national stage by hiring him to run the Christian Coalition - say his work with Mr. Abramoff's Indian casino clients raises questions about how he has balanced his personal ambitions with his Christian principles.

"You know that song about the Rhinestone Cowboy, 'There's been a load of compromising on the road to my horizon,' " Mr. Robertson said. "The Bible says you can't serve God and Mammon."

[snip]

Unlike most conservative Christian leaders, Mr. Reed was drawn to Republican politics first and evangelical faith later. He arrived in Washington as a 19-year-old Senate intern in 1981 and became executive director of the College Republican National Committee two years later, under Mr. Abramoff as chairman.

Mr. Abramoff was "a conservative firebrand," Mr. Reed wrote in his book "Active Faith." The men became so close that Mr. Reed sometimes slept on Mr. Abramoff's couch and later introduced Mr. Abramoff to his future wife.

The same year he joined the College Republicans, Mr. Reed started attending an evangelical church and became born again.

[snip]

"There is a duality to Ralph, the godly rhetoric and the hardball political operative, and what he says with his godly hat on is very different than with his political hat on," said Marshall Wittmann, who worked as legislative director of the Christian Coalition but is now a senior fellow at the centrist-liberal Democratic Leadership Council. "There are very few guardrails for Ralph when it comes to politics."

During his years at the Christian Coalition, his opponents and some evangelical Christians, including Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, sometimes argued that Mr. Reed put Republican political or economic goals ahead of social conservative policies. The Internal Revenue Service declined to renew the Christian Coalition's tax-exempt status as a nonpartisan group in 1999, concluding after a 10-year review that it had worked too closely with the Republican Party.

Soon after he left the organization in 1997, it nearly imploded as financial problems came to light.

At the time, Mr. Reed said he was starting a political consulting and communications firm "because I know there are hundreds of candidates out there who share the kind of values that I do." But his firm, Century Strategies, also took on deep-pocket corporate clients, including Verizon, Enron and Microsoft.

Some Christian conservatives were surprised. "Most of us in the movement are where we are because we believe in what we are doing," said the Rev. Don Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association. "I don't know any of us trying to get rich."

[snip]

Among the Republican Party stalwarts at the meeting near Atlanta, though, many were eager to snap pictures of themselves and their families with Mr. Reed. In his speech, he omitted references to God, prayer, abortion, obscenity or the Christian Coalition, instead echoing President Bush's inaugural themes about spreading democracy abroad.

"We are so proud of him when he gets on television because he speaks for people like me, true conservative Republicans, and it is such a breath of fresh air to see someone who can go toe to toe with the people who don't," said Jean Studdard, a local Republican official.

"We really haven't heard anything about the Indian gambling thing yet," she added. "Of course, we want to hear Ralph's side of the story."

Good grief. The fundies are so stupid. How could you not see through this hypocrite? I mean, he doesn't even pretend very well.

And, please remind me, should I ever suffer a concussion or something and link to the Bull Moose, that he voluntarily worked for Ralph Reed and can never never ever be trusted. Weasel.
- posted by TJ @ 10:23 AM