Reed’s Greed(Ralph Reed is going down, down, down. And taking his GOP budd

[RedEarth]

Ralph Reed is going down, down, down. And taking his GOP buddies with him.
By Terence Samuel
Web Exclusive: 12.15.05

Print Friendly | Email Article

The Bush Administration finds itself in a very odd place--under and sinking fast--and for them, the dislocation must be staggering. And while it is interesting to watch as the White House unveils its new candor campaign in trying to right itself, that effort may be the definition of ‘too little, too late.’ All you have to do to understand the extent of the GOP’s problems is to look at what is going on with one-time Golden Boy Ralph Reed, who is on the 2006 ballot in Georgia. He is going under fast and taking other Republicans with him, in magenta-red Georgia no less.

The founding executive director of the Christian Coalition, who ten years ago appeared on the cover of Time under the headline, "The Right Hand of God: Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition," has GOP leaders in Georgia so worried that some of them are asking him to withdraw, fearing he will kill their entire ticket.

For Reed, this run for lieutenant governor is part of an assault on greatness: lieutenant governor in 2006, governor in 2010, and president after that. But Reed is an example of what Jack Abramoff will mean to the GOP next year. Reed was an integral part of the Abramoff gambling swindle in Texas in 2002, in which the former super lobbyist worked both sides of the gambling debate, working for one client to get a casino shut down, with Reed’s help, then signing up the vanquished Indian tribe for more than $4 million to get the casino reopened, which he tried to do with the help of the now embattled Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio.

It is hard to measure but impossible to deny the damage that Abramoff has done to the GOP’s chance in 2006, and Reed may become the poster boy for the Abramoff Effect in the 2006 midterms. If Republicans can’t pull off the political reversal they need in the wake of Iraq and Katrina and get rid of the scandal cloud over the Congress, the 2006 elections may go down in history as the end of the GOP revolution of 1994, a 12-year period during which they not only ran the government, but developed a pugnacious, unsentimental way of doing business and an overconfidence that Democrats still have not figured out how to match. And in a lot of ways, Reed and Abramoff were archetypes of the times, and weaved into the collapse of their personal and political fortunes, is the demise of a political movement.

Obviously, they are not alone: Tom DeLay is in trouble with the Justice Department, Conrad Burns is paving the way for a Democratic senator from Montana, Bob Ney needs a criminal lawyer, and Duke Cunningham is going to jail. But Reed and Abramoff were part of that GOP crowd that seemed to have figured out something fundamental about American politics that would make them unbeatable. Two other notables on that list, Karl Rove and Grover Norquist, have also attracted the attention of federal investigators.

http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=10738