July 23, 1999   10 Av 5759

THE REBIRTH OF RALPH REED
The symbol - and lightning rod - of the Christian right is now a
political consultant to the GOP. Should Jews be worried?

You don't like him. Or, more accurately, you don't want to like him.
Ralph Reed represents all you're against: prayer in schools, repeal of
abortion, "Christian nation" talk, "family values," Jerry Falwell and Pat
Robertson - all those code words and causes you believe would be the death
of America's most fundamental liberties. He's wrong, you want to say, he's
not good for the Jews - except for his support of Israel, and we all know
what's behind that.
Or are you simply afraid of him? This is a man who, with Pat Robertson,
essentially created the Christian Coalition. Now a political consultant
with his own Duluth-based firm, Century Strategies, he's in our backyard,
saying he has the ear of George W. Bush and a host of right-of-center
political comers.
In person, Reed is a study in contrasts. His face is boyish, with a shock
of neatly groomed hair slicked back over his forehead, but his voice is
commanding, almost brusque. He is sharp, there is no doubt about that, and,
as he makes clear to an interviewer, his time is valuable.

This zealot's image

He's also charming. People like him. But, for many, Reed the man becomes
mixed up with Reed's unsettling persona: a fundamentalist firebrand in a
pinstriped suit. Rightly or wrongly, opinions of him, particularly in the
Jewish community, are driven by this zealot image.
"He is one of the most misunderstood and misjudged figures in the Jewish
community," says Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, president and founder of the
Chicago-based International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. Even Abraham
Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, insists Reed is no
bogeyman. "I find Ralph, in addition to being smart and perceptive, a
decent human being," says Foxman. "I consider him a friend."
In an interview, Reed comes across as moderate. The dialogue is open;
there's room for discussion, compromise. Yet, one wonders what beats
underneath the ice-blue shirt and the muted red tie. A political theorist?
A bloody-shirt-waving crusader? An Iago, as they like to say, looking for
an Othello?
On one wall of Reed's office is a bucolic portrait of Reed, his wife Jo
Anne, and their four children. In his 1996 book, "Active Faith" - a
political history and memoir - Reed frequently invokes Jo Anne when talking
about his major career decisions. Family is one reason, he says, why he
located his firm in metropolitan Atlanta, he says, and "family" is a
euphemism he uses when describing his conservative beliefs.
Ralph E. Reed, Jr. was born in Virginia in 1962. He grew up in Miami, the
son of an ophthalmologist. Reed attended public schools, joined the local
swim club, learned to play golf, and followed the Miami Dolphins, he
recalls.

The Methodist at the bar mitzvah

Miami also had a large Jewish population. "I really got exposed to Judaism
at a very early age - went to synagogue with friends, and attended bar
mitzvahs," Reed says. "Obviously, we were raised Methodist, yet there was
also a commonly shared set of values: faith in God, the importance of
family, basic values like honesty and hard work."
Reed's political consciousness developed at a young age. His father was a
Naval reserve officer, and the family's politics were bedrock Republican.
But the Vietnam War and Watergate affected young Reed. "I saw the
confidence in the institution of government and of politics as a profession
fall into disrepute," he says. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however,
Reed stuck to his right-wing roots, while longing for a leader who could
live up to his ideals.
Reed read history voraciously; he watched the 1972 presidential
conventions, both of which were held in Miami Beach that year, almost
gavel-to-gavel. He got involved in politics early. By age 14, he had won a
landslide election for student body president at his junior high school and
worked on the congressional campaign of a family friend.
In 1976, Reed's family moved to Toccoa, a town in northeast Georgia not far
from the South Carolina line. He became active in political organizations,
such as the American Legion program for young political leaders, Boys
State. (Another Boys State graduate: Bill Clinton.)
But his career really blossomed at the University of Georgia, where Reed
chaired the College Republican Club and eventually became the executive
director at the national level. He mobilized the youth vote for Ronald
Reagan in 1984, working with high-profile Republican operatives like Lee
Atwater and Ed Rollins.
But Reed had had a born-again experience while in college, and decided to
leave politics-surely not the truest path to salvation- behind. After the
Reagan landslide he enrolled in graduate school at Emory University, and
worked studiously toward earning a teaching degree in history his adviser,
Emory history professor Dan T. Carter, remembers him as a "quick study."
But he couldn't quite get the political game out of his blood. And in
1988, attending a Republican caucus at the DeKalb County courthouse, Reed -
ironically a delegate for supply-sider Jack Kemp - had his political
epiphany.
In 1988, televangelist Pat Robertson had established grass-roots beachheads
in some Midwest and Southern states. In DeKalb, the Robertson forces had
packed the hall with their supporters; Reed and Jo Anne were the only two
Kemp backers in their precinct. Instead of being discouraged, Reed was
impressed. A year later in Atlanta, Reed became the first staff member of
the Christian Coalition, the fundamentalist organization Robertson created
from the network of his '88 campaign. In five years, the Coalition had a
$20 million annual budget and 1.5 million supporters.

Evangelism and politics, an explosive mix

Evangelical Christians try to convert the unconverted, something many Jews
views as odious. Moreover, the rhetoric of evangelicals has occasionally
crossed the line into anti-Semitism; Jews have been denounced as hopeless
sinners and part of a world-controlling cabal.
Add in politics and the relationship becomes even more explosive.
Historically, Jews have been city dwellers, liberal activists, and
Democratic voters; evangelicals have lived in rural areas and pockets of
suburbia, opposed a powerful federal government, and voted Republican.
After decades of assimilation, many Jews may find themselves more
comfortable with the economic beliefs of the GOP, but the issues near and
dear to the religious right - such as prayer in schools, a hard line
against abortion, and opposition to gay rights - have made many wary.
Reed tempered the Christian Coalition's rhetoric and sought to bring other
mainstream religious groups into partnership. "Reed inaugurated two sort-of
initiatives which reflect an awareness of the problems of evangelical
Christians in politics in American history," says Mark Silk, director of
the Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in
Hartford, Conn. "One was outreach to Roman Catholics. The other reflects
Southern evangelical issues. They raised a bunch of money for rebuilding
the black churches that burned down.
"So he was determined to, at least, make it clear that the Coalition was
not going to be narrowly sectarian," Silk adds, "and possess any of these
sort of unattractive racist or religious dimensions of some previous
manifestations of Southern evangelical politicking."
"Relationships ... are the basis of everything," says Reed. "I tried to
spend as much time as I could building mutual respect and trust, so when
those flash points came along that provided an opportunity for division
between Christians and Jews, you could pick up the phone and get through it
based on your trust and friendship ... There were times when some in the
Jewish community said things that were hurtful to Christians, and times
when some in the Christian community said things that were hurtful to
Jews." One example he offers is the likening of abortion by evangelicals
to the Holocaust.

The assault on tolerance

Nevertheless, relations between Jews and the religious right hit a new low
in June 1994, when the Anti-Defamation League released a report - "The
Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America" -
accusing Robertson and other evangelicals of fostering intolerance and
tearing down the barriers between church and state. Other Jewish groups,
including the American Jewish Congress, echoed the ADL's position.
Robertson fired back with his own report with accusations of defamation; a
series of letters between him and the ADL's Foxman only heightened
tensions. "We did a report, he wrote a 40-page critique, we wrote a
20-page critique, and then I got a letter from him, saying that I'm a
sinner," recalls Foxman.
In this charged atmosphere, a meeting was arranged between Jews and
evangelicals in Washington. There, Foxman and Reed established a working
relationship. Then Foxman invited Reed to address the ADL's April
Leadership Conference. The two, Foxman says, "had agreed to disagree
agreeably."
Eckstein says he worked with Reed to "put out the fire." "Here you have
people like Ralph and Pat [Robertson] who see themselves as being among the
best friends that Israel and the Jewish people have," he says. "So they
were extraordinarily hurt - not just offended, but hurt." Eckstein helped
put together the meeting where Reed and Foxman met. "Ralph was essential,"
says Eckstein, "in supporting the efforts of building reconciliation
between the Jewish and Christian communities."

"Deeply hurt"

Reed remembers being "deeply hurt" by the ADL report. "In politics, you
learn to shrug things off, but that was hard to shrug off.
"But it turned out to be an opportunity," he continues. "God used that
hurt for His opportunity."
At the April ADL conference, Reed struck a deferential note. His speech
described Jews' "history of remarkable courage, unbelievable adversity, and
unfathomable pain." He mentioned his trip to Israel in January 1994, and
described a visit to Yad Vashem as the "most moving experience" of his
trip. At the same time, he defended the Christian Coalition and religious
conservatives, though taking care to emphasize that "the Christian
Coalition believes in a nation ... where the separation of church and state
is complete and inviolable."
"I felt that it was an opportunity for someone from the Christian community
to say, 'I understand what you feel, and I understand your fears, and I'm
not dismissive of them'," he says today. "That was something that needed
to be said."
For his part, Foxman says, "If he had asked us to write the speech, I don't
think we could have written it better."
However, Reed was challenged by reporters at the meeting, including the
Jewish Times' Washington correspondent, James D. Besser, who questioned him
about differences between Reed's pragmatic statements and Robertson's
fundamentalist declarations.
Reed, though acknowledging that evangelicals' talk - like Robertson's -
occasionally rubs Jews the wrong way, remains a staunch defender of his
former boss. In "Active Faith," he calls him "one of the dearest and most
reliable friends of Israel and the Jewish people ... If [he] is an
anti-Semite, he is the most bizarre and cynical anti-Semite ever known to
man," a man who has donated large sums of money to Jewish charities,
denounced David Duke and Louis Farrakhan, and lobbied Congress "like the
committed Zionist he is."
After the ADL address, Reed spoke at other Jewish gatherings. A month
later, he was the featured guest at the annual meeting of the American
Jewish Committee. Rabbi James Rudin, the AJC's director of interreligious
affairs, had been both a partner and opponent of Reed's. "He was a
formidable ally on Israel, a formidable adversary on domestic issues," he
says.
The meeting was "contentious, in the AJC fashion," chuckles Rudin, but
ironically the strongest criticisms came from Rev. James M. Dunn, executive
director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs. The Baptist
Joint Committee, which opposes school prayer and is strongly committed to
the separation of church and state, accounts for about 20 million of the
nation's 30 million Baptists, according to Dunn. The major holdout: the
Southern Baptist Convention, from which the Christian Coalition has drawn
much of its strength.

A saccharine speech

A Texan with a penchant for bluntness, Dunn says, "Reed made a speech so
saccharine nobody could fuss about it."
Overall, however, Rudin believes the meeting went fairly well. "I think we
had what Martin Luther King would have called 'creative tension'," he says.
"Our place pushed him a little more on his beliefs, and he was questioned
more critically."
Reed's further attempts to build bridges with the Jewish community met with
varying degrees of success. One invitation, Foxman recalls, provoked
resistance; Foxman was one who questioned the critics.
"He's not an enemy of the Jewish people, he's someone to listen to," Foxman
says now. "He has the courage to meet you halfway. ... Ralph passionately
believes in his truth. He advocates his truth. But he has an appreciation
for other truths. That's a major, major difference when you're dealing
with true believers."
Marshall Wittmann, a Jewish lobbyist who is now director of congressional
relations at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, worked as the Christian
Coalition's chief lobbyist. The only problems he had being a Jew in the
Coalition, he says, came from his own family and friends. "I often tell
people that it was the only job I ever had where my employer sent me Rosh
Hashanah cards," he says with a laugh. "Ralph particularly understood some
of the stresses I faced in my own personal life because I was a Jew working
for the Christian Coalition."
If the Christian Coalition and Jewish organizations didn't agree on much,
they did agree on one item: a strong Israel, though even here there has
been cause for concern. A number of Christian organizations support Israel
because a modern state of Israel is necessary for the Last Days and the
return of Jesus Christ.

Leaving the Christian Coalition

In 1997, Ralph Reed left the Christian Coalition. Much has been made of his
departure, but in "Active Faith" - published the previous year - Reed
wrote: "[I]f they are to be taken seriously, people of faith must do more
than rock the boat and panic the establishment. They must exhibit a
seasoned capacity and an enthusiasm for governance, coalition building, and
working within a political party that stands on the brink of long-term
majority status."
Mark Silk, for one, thinks this conciliatory attitude effectively triggered
Reed's departure. Others say he felt it was time to move on to a bigger
playing field without the inherent constraints of fringe politics. Reed
agrees: "I was ready for a new professional challenge."
In Reed's absence, the Christian Coalition has declined. Newsweek reported
that Robertson lent the organization $1 million last year - and in June the
organization's tax-exempt status was revoked by the IRS, which is seeking
more than $300,000 in back taxes. Its relationships with Jewish groups
have also cooled. Abe Foxman, for one, says he "misses Ralph's presence
and leadership" and that he hasn't really connected with the group since
Reed left.
In "Active Faith," Reed traces the role of a series of grass-roots
religious-political movements in American history. His old Emory adviser,
Dan Carter, notes that the Christian Coalition is squarely in this
tradition. The Coalition, he says, "is another in the long line of
resistance movements which have sprung up in response to the stresses of
modernization and the secularization of American society ... The problem is
that, to me at least, the movement has all too often focused on the wrong
targets ("liberals," gays, etc.) while failing to challenge ... the taproot
of our spiritual malaise and civil decline: mindless consumerism,
laissez-faire economics and unfettered capitalism." As Reed notes in his
book, the impact of these groups may be profound, but seeds of decline are
often sown in their success.

On the wrong side of substantive issues

Reed created his political consulting firm, Century Strategies, just after
leaving the Coalition. The firm ended up running 22 campaigns in a dozen
states. Not surprisingly the incumbents did well - four of the five,
including Georgia Sen. Paul Coverdell and Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, won
their races - but overall Reed broke even in 1998, a year in which
Democrats did better than expected.
Democratic political consultant Mark Mellman suggests Reed is discovering
the political game is a lot more difficult from the outside. "He was an
extraordinarily successful leader of the Christian Coalition," he says.
"But, I think he's having more trouble electing people to office because
he's on the wrong side of substantive issues from most Americans."
One Reed loss was close to home. In the Georgia lieutenant governor's
race, his client was Fulton County Chairman Mitch Skandalakis, who was
running against the eventual winner, Democrat Mark Taylor. The Skandalakis
campaign was a public relations nightmare. Skandalakis blasted Atlanta
mayor Bill Campbell, a strategy widely seen as racially motivated, and ran
an ad depicting a shadowy Taylor-like figure (Taylor had admitted to past
drug problems) in a detox facility. Atlanta Constitution editorial page
Editor Cynthia Tucker blasted Reed for the debacle.
Reed says he had nothing to do with the ads. "I advised [Skandalakis] ...
that [Atlanta-bashing] would be disastrous to the campaign," Reed insists.
"I strenuously urged the candidate not to [run the Brooks drug ad]. I
think everybody knows my record on issues of racial reconciliation is
strong, and one that I'm proud of." If something similar should happen
again, he says, he would quit the campaign.
But underneath his regret is political desire, the hunger which drove Reed
to those overwhelming victories in junior high and high school. He's
gotten an early jump on the 2000 campaign by becoming an unofficial adviser
("I help him and support him.") to Texas Gov. George W. Bush. "Gov. Bush is
a unifying figure, not only for the Republican party but for the nation,
and therefore he is attracting support across the spectrum of our party,"
Reed says.
Reed thinks the Jewish community would be very comfortable with George W.
Bush as president, despite his declaration years ago that only those who
accept Jesus will go to heaven. "I think Gov. Bush will make it clear that
while he believes that faith plays a role in our public life," Reed says,
"that he doesn't wish to use his office or the government to impose his
religion on anybody else," Reed says.
Whether Ralph Reed will be one of the individuals shaping Bush's campaign,
or as he imagined not so long ago, this nation's agenda, remains to be
seen. The real question is whether he will be able to remake himself.
Ironically, Ralph Reed must be born again, not to save his soul this time,
but his career.

The Reed File
Born:             1962

Education:         B.A. University of Georgia; Ph.D., Emory University

Professional:    Political consultant, founder Century Strategies

Wife:         Jo Anne

Children:     Brittany,10, Ralph III, 8, Chris, 6, Nicole, 20 months

Resides:     Duluth, GA

Books:     Active Faith
        (The Free Press, 1996)

Reed has visited Israel twice: the first time in early 1994, and the second
this year. The first trip, not long after the Oslo accords, was sponsored
by the Jerusalem Post. Reed describes it was a chance "to get to know the
country." But it was also a chance for him to meet Israeli politicians,
particularly those of the Likud party, whose ties to the religious right go
back to the Reagan years. Reed acknowledges he has "the closest affinity"
with Likud.
Reed says the influx of American political advisers - James Carville for
new Prime Minister Ehud Barak; Arthur Finkelstein for Binyamin Netanyahu -
into Israel, "certainly seems to have brought Israeli politics of age."
"Party organization and party mobilization are still more important in
Israel than media and polling," he adds. "Look, I met with Netanyahu in
'94 and he said ... they would pass these accords, I guess it was Oslo, and
that somebody is going to blow up a bus or blow up a restaurant - that's
exactly what happened. And, as a result of security fears, he won. And
then he lost because he agreed to the Wye Accords, which helped implode his
conservative base. So I don't know that [political advisers] really
effected the outcome of either election."
As for Barak, who's now extending the promised olive branch, Reed shrugs.
"I recognize that Barak won and won pretty strongly, and if - without
compromising Israeli security - if he can accelerate the peace process and
bring about an end to the killing, I'm certainly supportive of that."