{"id":7969,"date":"2006-07-19T09:10:41","date_gmt":"2006-07-19T13:10:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/7969.html"},"modified":"2006-07-19T09:10:41","modified_gmt":"2006-07-19T13:10:41","slug":"down-goes-reed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/down-goes-reed\/","title":{"rendered":"Down goes Reed"},"content":{"rendered":"

[tag]Ralph Reed[\/tag], a man who once bragged about leaving his political opponents in “body bags<\/a>,” saw his political career come to a screeching halt<\/a> last night. In fact, it wasn’t even close.<\/p>\n

Ralph Reed, the former director of the [tag]Christian Coalition[\/tag] and a former Republican lobbyist involved in the Jack Abramoff scandal, suffered an embarrassing defeat in his effort to win the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Mr. [tag]Reed[\/tag] conceded defeat before 10 p.m., with his opponent leading by more than 10 percentage points.<\/p>\n

Early Wednesday, with more than 92 percent of precincts reporting, Mr. Reed’s opponent, State Senator [tag]Casey Cagle[\/tag], led with 56 percent of the vote.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A year ago, Reed was expected to not only win the primary, but cruise to an easy victory. A week ago, Reed was neck and neck with Cagle. And 12 hours ago, Reed lost by double digits. Ouch.<\/p>\n

This may have been a GOP [tag]primary[\/tag] for a lieutenant governor’s race in [tag]Georgia[\/tag], but Reed’s embarrassing defeat has national implications: Reed has been one of the leading figures in the Jack [tag]Abramoff[\/tag] scandal for months. The GOP line has been that the culture-of-corruption issue isn’t connecting with voters and that Abramoff’s name is not a big deal outside the beltway. Reed’s vote total suggests otherwise. Indeed, as Jesse Lee noted<\/a>, Reps. John Doolittle, Richard Pombo, Jerry Lewis, Bob Ney, and Charles Taylor can’t be pleased with yesterday’s results.<\/p>\n

As for Reed personally, this race was supposed to be the start of a very successful career in elected office. The far-right Washington Times reported<\/a> last year that Reed planned to win this race in ’06, run for governor in 2010, and then run for president after that. Seriously. Yesterday’s results will probably put a crimp in those plans.<\/p>\n

Oddly enough, the happiest people in the country about Reed’s defeat are probably Republican leaders in Georgia.
\n<\/p>\n

“It may mean that Democrats lose the lieutenant governor’s race,” said William Boone, a political science professor at Clark-Atlanta University. “It certainly takes away the issue of corruption that the Democrats nationally have been using.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In recent months, most of Georgia’s GOP establishment endorsed Cagle. Gov. Sunny Purdue (R) made clear he preferred to seek re-election without four months of stories about Reed’s over-the-top corruption making headlines. I know a lot of Dems in Georgia who wanted nothing more than a Reed victory yesterday because it might have helped boost the Dem ticket statewide.<\/p>\n

Maybe. But in the meantime, seeing Reed humiliated in his home state by a virtual unknown helps restore my faith in the electorate, at least a little.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[tag]Ralph Reed[\/tag], a man who once bragged about leaving his political opponents in “body bags,” saw his political career come to a screeching halt last night. In fact, it wasn’t even close. Ralph Reed, the former director of the [tag]Christian Coalition[\/tag] and a former Republican lobbyist involved in the Jack Abramoff scandal, suffered an embarrassing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7969\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}