Money is like water down the side of the mountain. It will find a way to get around the trees.
--Ralph Reed
IT WAS JUNE 4, a Saturday, a little after 9 A.M., at the Golden Corral restaurant in Lawrenceville, Georgia, about 20 miles north of downtown Atlanta, and Phyllys Ransom--red hair, white skin, blue eyes; a walking, talking American flag--was explaining why she supports Ralph Reed.
"Integrity is something people talk a lot about, but so few people have," Phyllys said.
A few feet behind Phyllys--"Make sure you spell my name right: P-h-y-l-l-y-s"--Reed shook hands with his supporters.
"I just think Ralph is authentic," Phyllys said. "And when you're authentic, you're comfortable. You see it in his comfort level. You see it in his--this is a word I like to use--congruence."
Reed was the executive director of the Christian Coalition from 1989 until 1997, when he resigned and moved to Duluth, a Georgia town not far from Lawrenceville, where he has since made a lucrative living as a public affairs and public relations specialist. Which living, however, has not kept Reed from answering the siren song of electoral politics. On February 17 he announced his candidacy for lieutenant governor of Georgia. The Republican primary--he already has one opponent, state senator Casey Cagle--is a year away, on July 18, 2006. If Reed wins, and then wins the general election that fall, he will be the first Republican lieutenant governor in the history of Georgia.
And so far, it seems, things are going Ralph Reed's way. He has
a vast fundraising network, assembled over 20 years in national Republican politics as a strategist, field organizer, and gadfly. Plus, a lot of Georgia Republicans love him--he served as chairman of the state party from 2001 to 2003. During his tenure Georgia voters elected a new Republican senator, Saxby Chambliss, and the first Republican governor since Reconstruction, Sonny Perdue. Once his stint as party chairman was over, Reed spent a year working on the campaign of someone Georgia Republicans love even more, President George W. Bush. Then, too, and most important--certainly they think so--the local political reporters, along with their Washington brethren, have pronounced Reed the "frontrunner" over a year before any actual voters will cast any actual votes. The race is all but over, you'd think.
Except you'd be wrong. And not because of anything within Reed's control, come to think of it. Iwatched him spend half an hour speaking to members of the Gwinnett County Republican party, and he knows how to work a crowd. He set specific goals ("We're going to assemble a grassroots army of 25,000 volunteers"); he shared his knowledge of policy ("We need to develop magnet technical high schools in every county of Georgia"); he waxed idealistic ("If we will not be afraid of our own philosophical shadow, if we will be who we really are, people will flock to us"); and he pushed all the right emotional buttons ("I know this is going to come as a surprise to some of you in this room, but the media is not for us").
