The Rise and Fall of Ralph Reed

In considering the collapse of Ralph Reed’s political dreams, it’s tempting to conjure up biblical parables about Jesus instructing his followers in humility by suggesting they go “sit in the lowest place”–or of pride going before a fall. Reed was the preternaturally boyish spear carrier for the religious right, the brash Evangelical who transformed the Christian Coalition into a populist power center, then helped usher Republicans into control of Congress and George W. Bush into the presidency. The next step was launching his own political career in his native Georgia: Reed would be elected Lieutenant Governor this November, then Governor four years hence. After that, his friends said, the White House would be within reach. The young man who at 33 graced TIME’s cover in 1995 as “The Right Hand of God” might appear there again, perhaps a decade from now, taking the oath of office on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

Instead, there was Reed, just 45 but with crow’s-feet carved gently into his temples, offering a meager group of supporters a curt concession speech in a hotel ballroom in Buckhead last week. He had lost the primary to a little-known state senator named Casey Cagle in a 12-point landslide, Reed’s once invincible lead in the polls and fund raising eroded by a year of steady revelations about his ties to the convicted former G.O.P. superlobbyist Jack Abramoff. In the political vernacular that Reed loves to employ, he was waxed.

In the week before the primary, as his campaign’s internal polls showed the race a dead heat and a published survey gave him a 4-point lead, Reed was assuring friends he would pull out a victory by doing what he had always done better than anyone else: turn out the vote by pinpointing with extreme efficiency the religious conservatives. “I do guerrilla warfare,” Reed once boasted to a reporter, describing how he ambushed his enemies as a political operative. “I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag.” So imagine everyone’s surprise, in Washington and Atlanta, when the results came in on primary night and suddenly it was Reed’s body that was in the bag.

“I’m proud of the campaign we ran,” Reed, weary but ever positive, told TIME. “I’m glad we did it.” He didn’t want to talk about why he lost, but those who know him say he blames the media–particularly the Atlanta Journal-Constitution–for their extensive coverage of his business ties to Abramoff, his friend from their days running the College Republicans in the early 1980s. For a high-profile religious conservative like Reed, the stories of being paid millions by one Indian tribe to run a religious-based antigambling campaign to prevent another tribe from opening a rival casino made him look like something worse than a criminal–a hypocrite. He had once called gambling a “cancer” on the body politic. And the e-mails to Abramoff didn’t help, especially those that seemed to suggest that the man who had deplored in print Washington’s system of “honest graft” was eager to be part of it. “I need to start humping in corporate accounts!” he wrote Abramoff a few days after the 1998 election.

To Reed, it sometimes appeared, Christian voters were pawns in a game of power swapping. The Journal-Constitution reported that the man who had once condemned China for its one-child policy and its persecution of Christians had created a “grass-roots” Christian group to lobby for freer trade with the superpower–an effort quietly financed by major U.S. corporations like Boeing that were the Georgian’s true clients. The profits Reed collected from such dealings were not, by any indication, the wages of illegal behavior. But to some they were the wages of sin. “He got nailed for being a phony,” says a fellow G.O.P. operative in Washington, with more than a little schadenfreude.

In Reed’s defeat, Democrats see reason to hope that their message about the G.O.P.’s “culture of corruption” is helping them toward their goal of taking back Congress in November. But that’s wishful thinking. With the exception of those few candidates tied directly to Abramoff–Representative Bob Ney in Ohio and Senator Conrad Burns in Montana–it’s unlikely that many Republicans will lose their seats over an issue Americans rank low on their list of concerns. If corruption were driving voters to the polls, Democrats should have won–or at least performed better in–the special election to fill the California House seat vacated by Duke Cunningham, the Republican jailed for taking bribes. But the Republican candidate won by 5 percentage points.

Matt Towery, a former aide to Newt Gingrich who is now an independent pollster and commentator, sees reasons for the G.O.P. to be worried that have nothing to do with Abramoff. “The party has misjudged the public’s mood. Between the flag and gay marriage, we’re running a faith and family-values campaign in a year when the public wants to deal with immigration, tax reform and energy costs,” Towery says. But Cagle was nearly identical to Reed on the issues. Both presented themselves as religious conservatives, and both were endorsed by Georgia Right to Life. The problem for Reed was that the Abramoff scandal simply showed him less as a Christian leader who, with tie flying and fists clenched, once led a march of young conservatives through Washington to protest the Soviet downing of a Korean airliner and more as an operative with a taste for playing rough and cashing in. He was still the Navy brat, scrawny and smart, that his mother described to PEOPLE magazine in 1995: “[Ralph] was a wheeler-dealer,” she said. “He always wanted to have the upper hand.”

It was a reputation he only halfheartedly tried to knock down. He reveled in the dichotomy of talking about using guerrilla tactics–of garroting his opponents and leaving them to die, “raking in the dough” and blitzing the other side with negative ads–to advance pro-family candidates and agendas. Whenever he identified someone who understood the dark side of politics, Reed would say approvingly, “He gets the joke.” It’s what drew political reporters to Reed: we appreciated him in the same way we do James Carville and Harold Ickes on the Democratic side, or Lee Atwater and the reigning master, Karl Rove, on the Republican side. They’re crass, sometimes ruthless and occasionally willing to stretch or even break a principle in order to win. Their redeeming quality is that most of them know they don’t have what it takes to be the candidates themselves. And that might have been Reed’s mistake.

Reed used to blame liberals and secularized politicians for treating religious conservatives as uneducated, gullible and easy to lead. He proved that religious voters were a potent force that shouldn’t be ignored or condescended to. “People of faith,” he once wrote, had become the new “Amos and Andy,” and he was determined to push to the center of American politics their “cluster of pro-family issues” so they could attract “a majority of voters.” But Reed forgot his own lessons. In the face of incredibly damning evidence, he insisted that he hadn’t done anything wrong and that he didn’t know he was consorting with a friend nicknamed Casino Jack or taking money from gambling interests. He thought he could convince his base that they shouldn’t believe their eyes and ears, that they should trust him instead. In the end, not enough did.

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