Editorials and Op-ed

Ralph Reed should step out
by Bob Irvin

   This is an open request to Ralph Reed: Please withdraw your candidacy for Lieutenant Governor, in order to avoid a grievous, majority-wrecking split in the Republican Party. If you should win the nomination, many thousands of Republican voters will desert us for the Democrats in 2006, defeating not only you but also many other good Republican candidates, maybe even Gov.Perdue. (You think this can't happen? Consider 1998, when Mitch Skandalakis -- who was your client -- lost the Lieutenant Governor's race so badly that he pulled under Guy Millner and David Ralston, as well as a dozen legislative candidates who otherwise would have won.) If you are defeated in the primary, that too will create bitter divisions in our base, badly weakening us for years. You are simply too divisive for our new majority. The ongoing scandal over casino money in Alabama is only the latest, but not likely the last, scandal to surface. You run the risk of destroying our majority coalition before it has had time to mature.

        I make this request because Ralph Reed is four things that Georgians do not elect. He is:

        1. A professional contract lobbyist, which is someone who is available for hire to influence political outcomes. This has been Ralph Reed's very lucrative business since he left the Christian Coalition, and even Pat Robertson has recently been quoted as saying that it raises doubts in his mind about Reed. Reed took millions of dollars from gambling interests in Louisiana and Mississippi, to stop competitive casinos in Texas and Alabama.  He took money from Enron to lobby the Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission to deregulate electricity. These three happen to have been in the newspaper, but they are three among who knows how many causes he has been glad to hire himself out to promote. His m.o. is to tell Evangelical Christians that his cause of the moment, for which he has been hired, is their religious duty, and therefore they need to write regulators, turn up at meetings, or whatever. As an Evangelical myself, I resent Christianity being used simply to help Reed's business.

        2. A Washington man, not a Georgia man.  We've elected some great people who became very important in Washington, from Carl Vinson to Paul Coverdell.  But they all started as Georgia politicians. Their perspective was that they were our representatives to Washington, not the other way round. Ralph Reed is the exact opposite: he built his career in Washington before ever evidencing the slightest interest in Georgia. His approach to politics is pure Washington: harsh partisanship, shady funding, "plausible deniability", and spin.  While he was Georgia State Republican Party Chairman, he said to me, speaking of the Washington crowd, "Remember, I work for them, not the other way around." Georgians by and large don't want to replicate the sleaze, gridlock, and ideological warfare of Washington here in Georgia.

        3. An ideologue.  Georgians have elected pragmatic problem-solvers, from George Busbee to Sonny Perdue. A point of view doesn't rule you out (Newt Gingrich is an example). But an ideologue is somebody whose sole "reason" for being elected is what he say he believes, rather than what he has done or can do to solve problems.  The last ideologue Georgia  elected was Lester Maddox.  Like Maddox, Reed is a politician whose main selling point is his opinions, not his accomplishments or his plans. He never evidenced any interest in Georgia issues until he starting running. And everybody knows that he doesn't have the least interest in being Lieutenant Governor. The Republican State Senators, who would be his "team" if he were to win, have almost unanimously endorsed his opponent, Casey Cagle. Reed wants to be Governor, and this is just the stepping stone.

        4. A person whose only career is politics. Georgians like for their officials to have made their way  in the real world. Roy Barnes is a lawyer. Sam Nunn is a lawyer. Even Zell Miller is a college professor. Not in modern times have we elected somebody who has no connection with the real world in which real people live. Ralph Reed has never made a dime outside the overheated, overcompensated, over-perked world of politics. What kind of personal   appreciation can he have for the problems of average Georgians?

       In the last few weeks, I can't tell you the number of people who have come up to me and volunteered something like, "I'm a Republican, but I'm not voting for Ralph Reed." Generally, they live in the surburbs, the decisive battleground in this and future elections, but some of them are in South Georgia.They are mostly long-time Republican activists, people I have known for 30 years or more in the finally-successful effort to build a two-party system.  Reed's  nomination will alienate them. His defeat will alienate his naive but devoted supporters. Either way, we're left with a minority. The only solution is for Reed to withdraw his candidacy. Please, Ralph, do it, before it's too late.

June 14, 2005