I really didn't have anything to write about today, until I saw that Ralph Reed was planning to announce his candidacy for Congress tomorrow, Sarah Palin style - from his Facebook account.
I live three miles from Gwinnett County, where retiring Congressman John Linder was elected 18 years ago, back when "Gwinnettians", as the traffic reporters call them, were mostly white and mostly middle class.
Now the biggest Asian supermarket in town is in Gwinnett County, along with the biggest Hindu temple in the United States. The intersection of Jimmy Carter Boulevard and Buford Highway, which used to be major commercial corridors in Gwinnett County, looks more like you are in Mexico than Georgia. Gwinnett County is not as solidly Republican as your lazy media analysts will be telling you over the next few months.
49% of Gwinnett County was black, Asian, or Hispanic in the 2009 census, and something tells me that those numbers will be even larger after the 2010 census numbers are tallied.
The rest of Linder's district - Barrow, Walton, and a slice of Newton County - is still pretty white, but these are people central casting would go looking for if they needed to cast Tea Baggers. Which means that Reed may not have the bona fides he thinks he does with this crowd, who are all anxious to see some new faces for a change.
Which brings me back to Ralph Reed, the slimest political operator in the nation after Jack Abramoff. His political direct mail company is famous for putting out the kind of imagery that was found in the RNC PowerPoint last week. Ralph Reed isn't a dog with fleas - he is just a damn big ass flea.
As the owner of Century Strategies, Reed is one of the biggest lobbyists in this state. In a year when the dreaded "L" word isn't "liberal" but "lobbyist", he has no way to wash the stench of the "porkulus" he helps Fortune 500 companies obtain off of his hands.
Ralph Reed, the Bernie Madoff of GOP fundraisers, has relied on his schoolboy looks to charm the Christian Coalition crowd out of their hard earned money for decades to fight evils like gambling WHILE DOING
"I'm proud of the campaign we ran," Reed, weary but ever positive, told TIME. "I'm glad we did it." He didn't want to talk about why he lost, but those who know him say he blames the media--particularly the Atlanta Journal-Constitution--for their extensive coverage of his business ties to Abramoff, his friend from their days running the College Republicans in the early 1980s. For a high-profile religious conservative like Reed, the stories of being paid millions by one Indian tribe to run a religious-based antigambling campaign to prevent another tribe from opening a rival casino made him look like something worse than a criminal--a hypocrite.
He had once called gambling a "cancer" on the body politic. And the e-mails to Abramoff didn't help, especially those that seemed to suggest that the man who had deplored in print Washington's system of "honest graft" was eager to be part of it. "I need to start humping in corporate accounts!" he wrote Abramoff a few days after the 1998 election.
Time Magazine, The Rise And Fall Of Ralph Reed
In the world of political whoring, Ralph Reed has proved time and time again that he is willing to sell his narrow ass to anybody willing to pay for a piece of it.
The only good thing about Ralph Reed running for office is that this time, with the kind of ego he's got, he is guaranteed to lose a pile of his own money in the process.
