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DEL.ICIO.USCagle tops Reed for GOP nomination
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the end, Ralph Reed couldn’t do for himself what he had helped Republicans do all the way up to the White House: Get elected.
Despite the backing of top conservatives including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Georgia Gov. Zell Miller, Reed failed to win Georgia’s GOP nomination for lieutenant governor Tuesday. He lost to little-known state Sen. Casey Cagle of Gainesville.
“I’m not focused on being a candidate in the future, but I’m glad I ran,” Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, told supporters in conceding to Cagle before all of the votes had been counted.
Cagle credited his Senate colleagues for helping him win the nomination. In February, 21 Republican state senators banded together to sign a petition declaring that Reed should drop out of the race — out of a concern, they said, that Reed would prove a drag on GOP Gov. Sonny Perdue’s re-election bid.
“My senators,” Cagle said. “I knew that by having these guys behind me that we could reach out into every community and have a base of support.”
Cagle will face either former state Sen. Greg Hecht of Jonesboro or former state Rep. Jim Martin of Atlanta in the November general election. The two Democratic candidates are headed to an Aug. 8 primary runoff.
Without a doubt, said state Sen. Cecil Staton (R-Macon), it was Cagle’s ability to tie Reed to convicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff that sealed Reed’s fate. In doing so, Cagle cracked Reed’s rock-hard base of Christian conservatives — whom Reed had led to the ballot box time and time again.
“The Cagle campaign was very successful at planting doubt among members of the faith-based community. They stayed home,” Staton said.
Star of religious right
With Reed as fuel, a normally dull, down-ticket race was transformed into a nearly national affair, fought out on Web sites and editorial pages across the country.
At the start of his 18-month campaign in 2005, Reed, 45, was considered a shoo-in, based on his national reputation with the Christian Coalition and his proven ability to churn out Republican votes — evangelical and otherwise — for two U.S. presidents, both named Bush.
After attending high school and college in Georgia, Reed in 1989 joined the Rev. Pat Robertson’s new organization, the Christian Coalition. As executive director, Reed applied a precinct-style organization that stressed grass-roots organizing.
It worked. With Reed at its head, the coalition was essential to the GOP’s 1994 takeover of the U.S. House, an effort led by Newt Gingrich. Months later, Reed made the cover of Time magazine as the boyish face of the religious right.
By 1997, Reed was back in Georgia. He had left the Christian Coalition to establish a private consulting firm — and to lay groundwork for his entry onto center stage in politics.
An early backer of George W. Bush in his 2000 presidential campaign, Reed parlayed those Bush contacts, and a reputation for grass-roots organization, into a successful bid for chairman of the state Republican Party in 2001. Republicans won the governorship and the state Senate the next year. Reed took an even larger role in Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign.
Telegenic, smooth and well-connected, Reed saw early money pour into his campaign for lieutenant governor at a record rate. One opponent, state Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine, withdrew early from the primary contest, leaving only Cagle, a 12-year veteran of the Legislature.
Reed pitched himself as the ideas candidate, with a 63-page, downloadable position paper that included his support for a state spending cap tied to population growth and inflation, and his call for a 20 percent across-the-board reduction in income taxes by 2011.
But while Reed was getting his campaign off the ground, a U.S. Senate committee and federal prosecutors were probing deeper into the affairs of Abramoff, a Reed associate who pleaded guilty in January to bilking his Indian tribe clients of tens of millions of dollars, and of bribery of a public official.
Reed has not been accused of any criminal wrongdoing.
But e-mails between Abramoff and Reed revealed that the longtime friends, who met as college Republicans, had developed a close business association, often sharing clients and trading favors.
Cagle used the Abramoff scandal to repeatedly accuse Reed of hypocrisy.
A Senate Indian Affairs Committee, chaired by U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), concluded that Reed had been paid $5.3 million by two casino-owning Indian tribes, both Abramoff clients, to rally Christian voters against attempts by other tribes to establish competing casinos.
Reed repeatedly denied that he knew the money that financed his anti-gambling campaigns came from gambling revenue, although several e-mails showed that Abramoff informed Reed of the money’s origins several times.
“The way he sold out our values? That’s wrong,” Cagle said in one of several TV ads that saturated Georgia’s airwaves in the final two weeks of the campaign.
In the last three months of the race, Cagle’s barrage against Reed began to pay off. Cagle rose in the polls and raised more than three times as much as Reed from contributors. Reed closed the financial gap with a $500,000 personal loan to his own campaign. By June 30, both men had raised roughly $2.5 million.
For the last six months of the campaign, Reed continually expressed regret for his association with Abramoff, and frustration that the media were not covering the important issues of the campaign.
Abramoff controversy
The lieutenant governor’s race in many ways became a measure of the continued influence of Reed and his Christian conservatives, nationally as well as within the state Republican Party.
Conservative radio-TV talk show host Sean Hannity and future presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani traveled to Georgia to help Reed build his war chest. Giuliani said it was “very important” that Reed get elected.
Bush, however, made only passing reference to Reed, and Cagle, when he visited in March for a fund-raiser for Perdue, which was attended by both lieutenant gubernatorial candidates.
“Two candidates running for lieutenant governor, Casey Cagle and Ralph Reed, we appreciate them both being here tonight,” Bush said.
The Abramoff controversy forced Reed to conduct a campaign that was usually out of the view of even journalists inside the state.
Cagle, meanwhile, built his campaign around a network of Republican public officials, most of them state lawmakers, who were worried about the impact that Reed’s candidacy could have on the re-election bid of Perdue. Perdue himself remained strictly neutral.
Reed often blamed “the liberal media” for focusing on the his dealings with Abramoff, but in fact many evangelical Christians were also disaffected.
Clint Austin of Marietta is a former Reed employee who ran Reed’s successful bid to become state Republican Party chairman in 2001. On Monday, Austin, now a state Capitol lobbyist, posted on the Internet an article in which he explained why he would not vote for Reed.
“My reason for abandoning my support of Ralph is simple: Ralph Reed’s words and actions do not match up,” Austin wrote.
Anecdotal evidence showed some attempts, including by gay and lesbian voters, to pull Democrats into the race against Reed, but their effectiveness couldn’t be measured by early returns. For more than a decade, Reed has served as a lightning rod for those critical of the expanding influence of evangelical Christians in national politics.
“Tomorrow morning, I’ll be voting Republican for the one and only time in my life, to stop Ralph Reed. If we let Reed win this election, we can kiss our freedoms good-bye,” said one automated phone message left anonymously on answering machines in white Democratic areas of Atlanta on Monday night.
A spokesman for the Cagle campaign denied authorship.
Reed’s defeat has set a limit on the influence of Christian conservatives in Georgia’s growing Republican Party, said Charles Bullock, a political scientist at the University of Georgia. “They may be the tail now, but they’re not the dog anymore,” he said.
As for Reed, Bullock said he didn’t see Reed coming back soon. “We’ve witnessed the final implosion of Ralph Reed,” he said. With initial expectations placed on his candidacy, it would be hard to reignite broad support, Bullock said.
Supporters in Reed’s emptying ballroom disagreed late Tuesday night.
“I’m obviously disappointed,” said a tearful Sadie Fields, head of the Georgia Christian Coalition. “The state lost an opportunity. But he will be back. He has far too much to offer.”
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