DLC's Ed Kilgore Explains How Ralph Reed Will Lose in Georgia

[wyldwolf]

In the autumn of 1998, Georgians were jolted from their armchairs by television ads run by a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor with the nicely onomatopoeic name of Mitch Skandalakis. One commercial played what political writer Josh Marshall later described as “the D.W. Griffith card,” charging gross incompetence on the part of Atlanta's predominantly black political leadership. Another featured an actor who resembled Skandalakis's opponent, state senator Mark Taylor, shuffling down a hallway at a well-known psychiatric and drug treatment facility near Atlanta. The ads were arresting, but they backfired. Skandalakis got stomped by Taylor, while a surprisingly high turnout among African Americans helped produce a victory for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Roy Barnes and other Democrats running statewide.

The Skandalakis campaign's top consultant was one of Georgia's most famous living sons—Ralph Reed. The former executive director of the Christian Coalition had left the financially troubled organization the previous year and launched a much-ballyhooed political consulting firm based in Atlanta called Century Strategies. The 1998 election cycle was supposed to be Reed's chance to prove that his political skills could stand on their own. But the reputation he developed wasn't the one he had hoped for. Republicans grumbled that his dirty tactics in the Skandalakis campaign were responsible for bringing down the party's entire state ticket. What's more, that campaign didn't seem to be the exception to Reed's modus operandi, but the rule. “Most started out strong,” wrote Marshall after the election, “with heavy appeals on moral issues (something Reed strongly advocated), faltered in the stretch, and, finally, resorted to a blizzard of low-ball (sometimes racially tinged) tactics before stumbling toward defeat.”

Reed... has a primary opponent, state senator Casey Cagle, whose campaign is increasingly based on the argument that Reed's presence on the ticket this November could produce a massive Republican defeat.

Cagle is having no trouble feeding on old Republican resentments of Reed. Last year Cagle supporter Bob Irvin, the former Georgia House Republican leader and a former state party chair, published an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal Constitution unsubtly reminding Republicans of Reed's role in the disastrous 1998 campaign. But Reed is the object of a deeper, and less publicized, scorn, according to Georgia Republican insiders. During his apparently triumphant 2002 stint as state party chairman, Reed used his position to tilt GOP spending towards the national party's priority of defeating U.S. senator Max Cleland, and away from the presumably doomed gubernatorial campaign of Sonny Perdue. When Perdue won and became Georgia's Republican potentate, he quickly, if quietly, showed Reed the door as party chairman.

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http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0604.kilgore.html