Ralph Reed's Zeal for Lobbying Has Shaken His Christian Base

The New York Times
April 18, 2005
Ralph Reed's Zeal for Lobbying Has Shaken His Christian Base
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and PHILIP SHENON

ATLANTA - In 30 years of culture wars, few conservative Christian standard bearers have traveled further in American politics than Ralph Reed. The former head of the Christian Coalition has been a high-priced communications consultant, a top Bush campaign adviser, chairman of Georgia's Republican Party and now a candidate for lieutenant governor here.

Campaigning in early April at a Republican district meeting outside Atlanta, Mr. Reed talked of his small-town roots in northeast Georgia.

"I'm not going to forget where I came from," he said. "I am not going to forget what I stand for."

But as he completes his journey from Christian advocate to professional politician, Mr. 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."

In Georgia, Mr. Reed's rival in the Republican primary is playing up his links with Indian casinos to try to revive longstanding criticism from conservative Christian purists that Mr. Reed has sometimes put his own ambitions ahead of their goals. At the meeting near Atlanta, for example, his opponents were doing their best to sow doubts in the crowd.

"The Christian Coalition, they may have some shady background," said Robert McIntyre, the treasurer of the Spalding County Republican Party, who still wore a Ralph Reed sticker on his lapel. "I was being loyal to Ralph Reed, but since now some things have come up, I need to listen. I am now wavering."

Others argue, however, that shaking soiled hands is sometimes the price of making an impact.

"Thirty or 40 years ago, the people who you would see as the spokesmen for traditional values kind of things were people who were outsiders railing against the system," said Kelly Shackelford, a prominent Christian conservative and president of the Free Market Foundation in Texas. "And if they didn't get a hundred percent of what they believe in, they weren't going to play." Mr. Reed led a new wave of Christian conservatives, Mr. Shackelford said, who "understand that you have to be part of the system, and you can't sit outside and throw rocks at everybody."

Bill Paxon, a former Congressman turned lobbyist who worked closely with Mr. Reed on Republican Congressional campaigns, said Mr. Reed was a man of many dimensions: a heartfelt Christian, a limited-government conservative and a canny political street fighter. "He was always all of the above," Mr. Paxon said.

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. "I was a bare-knuckled political operative," Mr. Reed wrote in his book. "In the rough and tumble of politics, I began to sense the need for spiritual roots."

In 1988, Mr. Robertson hired Mr. Reed to build the Christian Coalition from his campaign organization. Mr. Reed became a hero to evangelical Christians who saw him as a fresh-faced, telegenic spokesman who could defend their views to the secular world of Sunday-morning talk shows and weekly magazines.

But he also boasted at times of working "under the cover of night" to mobilize grass-roots support. He honed his skills at organizing phone banks and direct-mail campaigns, and former associates say he talked in the cynical lingo of political operatives, referring to a candidate as "the body" and about fund-raising "dough."

"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."

Some of Mr. Reed's efforts for clients soon drew criticism. While he was working as an adviser to George W. Bush's campaign in 2000, he also was working for Microsoft on a campaign to influence Mr. Bush and other presidential candidates about the company's antitrust battles. Mr. Reed later apologized for creating the appearance of a conflict.

In Georgia, some conservative Christians were troubled by Mr. Reed's consulting work for Mitch Skandalakis, a losing candidate for lieutenant governor who ran advertisements portraying one rival in racial stereotypes and another as a drug addict. (Mr. Reed said afterward that he opposed racially divisive tactics.)

"There are questions as to whether Mitch Skandalakis lined up well with the viewpoints of social and economic conservatives," said Randy Hicks, president of the Georgia Family Council. "And Ralph taking him on was not well received by an awful lot of people."

By 1999, Mr. Abramoff, who was well known as a lobbyist for Indian casinos, had hired Mr. Reed's firm to help organize antigambling campaigns in Texas and Louisiana.

Lisa Baron, a spokeswoman for Mr. Reed's firm, said that Mr. Abramoff had told Mr. Reed that the payment for his consulting services came from a "broad-based coalition" of antigambling groups. "We did not know who his specific clients were or their specific interests," Ms. Baron said.

In fact, Mr. Abramoff had recruited Mr. Reed to help the Coushatta Indians of Louisiana shut down or block casinos operated or proposed by the Tiguas, in neighboring Texas, or the Jena Band of Choctaws, in Louisiana, according to disclosures by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, which is investigating $82 million in lobbying fees that Mr. Abramoff and his partner, Michael Scanlon, reaped from tribes.

E-mail messages disclosed by the committee last year offered some unflattering views of Mr. Reed and Mr. Abramoff. In one, Mr. Reed forwarded potentially damaging information about Indian contributions to a politician supporting the casinos, saying, "We are getting this in the water with the right people."

In another, he called supportive legislators his "tigers." And he boasted of how he had gotten "our pastors all riled up" to push John Cornyn, who was then Texas attorney general and is now a senator, to close the Tigua casino. Mr. Cornyn, however, already had opposed gambling, according to a spokesman.

After a court ruled against the Tiguas' casino on Feb. 11, 2002, Mr. Abramoff wrote to Mr. Reed in an e-mail message: "I wish those moronic Tiguas were smarter in their political contributions. I'd love us to get our mitts on that moolah."

Ms. Baron, Mr. Reed's spokeswoman, said that after the cost of direct mail, phone banks and radio advertising, his firm kept only 15 percent to 20 percent of the roughly $4 million it received from Mr. Abramoff between 1999 and 2002.

"Ralph is in the casino-closing business," she said, "and we ran a successful grass-roots campaign to close casinos and prevent casinos from operating."

Seven days after the "moolah" message, however, Mr. Abramoff sent the Tigua tribe an elaborate proposal that it pay him to help reopen the casino. Ms. Baron said that Mr. Reed had "no knowledge" of Mr. Abramoff's plan to seek business on both sides of that casino fight.

In the Christian conservative world that forms Mr. Reed's most natural political base, many say they accept his explanation. "He was betrayed by a friend who lied to him," said Dr. Richard Land, president of the ethics and religious liberties commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Tom Minnery, a vice president of Focus on the Family, said he did not know the facts. He said the group had often criticized Republican politicians, including Mr. DeLay, for taking money from gambling interests. Of Mr. Reed, Mr. Minnery said, "We wish he wouldn't have done that."

Mr. Reed's primary opponent, State Senator Casey Cagle, criticized him last week for inviting at least three lobbyists whose firms have worked for gambling concerns to a Washington fund-raiser tomorrow.

"Ralph has a lot of things he has got to answer for, like this gambling situation," said Joel McElhannon, a consultant to Mr. Cagle's campaign. "It strains believability that somebody hands him $4.2 million and he doesn't know where that money came from."

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."

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Atlanta for this article, and Philip Shenon from Washington.