-Caveat Lector- >From WorkingForChange (URL @ bottom)
}}}>Begin Ralph Reed's guerrilla war What the cherub-faced operative was doing behind the scenes By Sara Pursley / LGNY 02.01.02 | "What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time, and one state at a time. I honestly believe that in my lifetime we will see a country once again governed by Christians...and Christian values." When the Christian Coalition's Ralph Reed said those words at the beginning of the culture wars in the 1990s, he might have sent a chill down the spines of many of us -- but few imagined how quickly Reed himself would be directly involved in the governance of the country. Reed once said of his political strategy: "I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night." Or until the uncovering of "scandalous" relationships between big business and government. Last week, the Christian guerrilla fighter was discovered, as Toronto Star columnist David Camp put it, "under the rubble of the Enron scandal." The New York Times reported that Bush's chief political advisor Karl Rove persuaded Enron to hire Reed in 1997 as a consultant at $10,000 to $20,000 a month. In 1999, Reed was hired directly by the Bush campaign as a senior advisor, while remaining on Enron's payroll. After John McCain won the New Hampshire primary, Bush turned publicly to Reed -- who is widely credited with d elivering the critical victory in South Carolina to Bush, by mobilizing Christian Right voters in that state. This mobilization included the mass distribution of a flier linking McCain to "homosexual groups." The Bush vic tory in South Carolina was, as Bill Berkowitz put it, "a grand old coming out party for the Christian Right." In a National Review column at the time, Reed called Bush "the most electable conservative presidential candidate in a generation," and declared that a Bush victory would be "a conservative triumph, not a moderate one." T he two have remained close ever since. Rove said this week that he was merely giving Reed an unsolicited "recommendation" to Enron executives. Rove further explains: "I'm a big fan of Ralph's, so I'm constantly saying positive things." It is a sign of the time s that Reed is now considered "mainstream" enough that this statement is a defense against scandal, and not the scandal itself. According to Reed, his job at Enron was to work on energy deregulation in Pennsylvania: "I met with three executives at Enron in September of 1997. They wanted assistance in building grass-roots support for electricity de regulation in Pennsylvania, which was supported by then-Governor Tom Ridge and which, by the way, has become a model for the nation." Californians, who are paying $50 billion for the free-market-driven energy crisis that profited Enron, can vouch for Reed on that last claim. Much of the media was left scratching its head at this strange footnote to the Enron debacle. The perception of Ralph Reed, constantly described as "cherub- faced" and a "Republican choirboy", was not of someone concerned with "hard" right-wing issues such as the deregulation of energy. Religious conservatives tend to get portrayed as crazier, perhaps, than economic conservatives, but also as more sincere. Anti-abortionist activists, for example, while often considered nutcases, have managed to retain a certain moral high ground: it is often accepted that they operate solely out of a belief that abortion is murder, even when they advocate positions that give away their opposition to women's self-determination (such as op posing safe sex education at the same time as opposing abortion). In an interview with CNN's Judy Woodruff, Reed easily countered accusations that the Bush campaign was trying to buy his endorsement through the Enron gig, or that it was trying to keep its connection with him secret. Ree d pointed out that he had been encouraging Bush to run for office since April of 1997, and that it was no secret that he was hired directly by the Bush campaign in 1999. By that point in time, Bush felt no need to hide hi s relationship with Reed and the Christian Right. It is likely, as some have claimed, that the Bush campaign wanted to keep Reed in reserve, without bringing him onto its "real" payroll immediately. That would explain Rove's motives. As for Reed, it shouldn't be surprisi ng that his conservatism is economic as well as moral-religious. When he founded his consulting firm Century Strategies, he said its role was to elect "pro-family, pro-life, and pro-free-enterprise" candidates to every le vel of American government. Proof that he was serious about the free-enterprise bit came in 2000, when a similar scandal erupted upon the revelation that Bill Gates had hired Reed to lobby Bush, as a presidential candidate, to support Microsoft's po sition in the Justice Department's antitrust case. Reed signed on with Microsoft in the fall of 1998, and stayed on the company's payroll after he was hired by the Bush campaign in 1999. (Presumably, then, Reed was being paid by Microsoft, Enron and Bush at the same time.) Century Strategies apologized for the "misperception" of a conflict of interest in the Microsoft scandal, although the apology practically drips with sarcasm -- it promises, for example, to stop "encouraging citizens to m ake their views known to Governor Bush's campaign." In that case, too, the media expressed confusion at what religiously conservative Reed was doing in bed with free-wheeling free-market Gates. But that was only because they refused to take Reed's own statements about his agenda seriously, and because they always viewed his famous stances on abortion and homosexuality to be motivated by misguided, "cherub-faced" morality. Sara Pursley last wrote "Unveiling Afghanistan" for WorkingForChange.com. 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