Republican Gomorrah Read online

To implement their scheme of manipulating “the wackos,” Abramoff and Scanlon turned to evangelical super-operative Ralph Reed. Reed and Abramoff had a long and complicated history. When Abramoff chaired the College Republican National Committee in the early 1980s, Reed served as the organization’s executive director. His mild manner and baby face masked his vicious streak. In the University of Georgia student newspaper, Reed boldly asserted his conservative values by attacking Mahatma Gandhi as the “Ninny of the 20th Century.” His article cost him his job at the paper, not because of its controversial content, but because its infantile name-calling was entirely plagiarized from other sources.

  Reed moved to Washington after school to join the Reagan Revolution, where he found Jesus in a phone booth. While hunched over the bar at an upscale pub in Washington, Reed suddenly felt the Holy Spirit beckoning him. That Holy Spirit “simply demanded that I come to Jesus,” he recalled. He stumbled into the street in a drunken haze, searching for the closest phone. Finally finding one, he flipped through the Yellow Pages until he found the “churches” listings and signed up as a born-again Christian the following day. Or so his story goes.

  In 1985, Reed helped organize mobs that shouted epithets at staff and women entering the Fleming Center for reproductive health in Raleigh, North Carolina, which dispensed birth control and performed abortions. He was arrested after rushing into the waiting room and avoided prosecution by signing a court statement promising not to harass people at the clinic again.

  At a dinner for George H. W. Bush in 1989, Reed met the man who would become his political benefactor, the Reverend Pat Robertson. The son of Senator Willis Robertson, a Southern Democrat and patriarch of Virginia aristocracy, the young Robertson was once on the fast track to a brilliant political career. His father secured him a post in a champagne unit during the Korean conflict, sent him to the finest schools, and arranged a job for him on the Senate Appropriations Committee. But Robertson grew alienated from his imperious father, turning instead to his evangelical mother, who taught him to speak in tongues. He impregnated a Catholic woman from a working-class background, married her just weeks before their child was born, and then moved her to a black neighborhood in Brooklyn. But visions of Jesus Christ riveted Roberston’s imagination, compelling him to leave his wife while she was eight months pregnant with their second child. As he departed to the Canadian woods to be closer to God, his wife excoriated him. “I’m a nurse,” she said to him. “I recognize schizoid tendencies when I see them, and I think you’re sick.”

  In Reed, Robertson recognized a kindred spirit. Once his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination sputtered out in failure, he hired Reed as executive director of the Christian Coalition, which became the largest political arm of the religious right. Reed conjured up the Christian Coalition with the advice of his old pal, Jack Abramoff, an Orthodox Jew. (In 2000, Abramoff wrote to Rabbi Daniel Lapin, who had long been on his payroll for lobbying duties, about his application to join the Cosmos Club in Washington, a distinguished private club. “Problem for me is that most prospective members have received awards and I have received none,” Abramoff said in a September 15, 2000, e-mail. “I was wondering if you thought it possible that I could put that I have received an award from Toward Tradition with a sufficiently academic title, perhaps something like Scholar of Talmudic Studies?” It would “be even better if it were possible that I received these in years past, if you know what I mean.” Lapin responded: “Let’s organize your many prestigious awards so they’re ready to ‘hang on the wall.’”)

  Reed flourished as a political boss, using the Christian Coalition as a new kind of Tammany Hall. He described his methods as stealth and assassination. “I want to be invisible,” he said in 1991. “I do guerilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag.”

  By 1995, after the stunning Republican capture of the Congress, Reed’s signal role in the Republican victories earned him a reputation as one of America’s top political consultants. His boyish face was splashed on the cover of Time magazine that year, above a caption hailing him as “The Right Hand of God.” But two years later, with the Christian Coalition under IRS investigation and Reed facing accusations of cronyism from the group’s chief financial officer, he left under a cloud to start his own consulting firm, Century Strategies. The Christian Coalition never recovered from his financial mismanagement and collapsed as a national organization. Reed contacted Abramoff right away. “I need to start humping in corporate accounts,” Reed told him the following year. “I’m counting on you to help me with some contacts.”

  Even though Abramoff apparently was never fond of Reed, he always viewed him as a useful tool. “I know you (we!) hate him [Reed], but it does give us good cover and patter to have him doing stuff,” he wrote in a February 2002 e-mail to Scanlon. “Let’s give him a list of things we want . . . and give him some chump change to get it done.” Reed, who once called Indian casinos “a cancer on the American body politic” and who had organized protests against gambling, thus became Abramoff and Scanlon’s liaison to the Christian right, enlisting evangelicals into a web of shadowy casino hustles that filled his bank account with nearly $4 million in “chump change.”

  Reed’s first sleight of hand involved enticing religious-right leaders Tony Perkins, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson to try blocking a 2001 bill in the Louisiana legislature loosening restrictions on riverboat casinos, which would have posed a competitive threat to Abramoff’s clients, the Coushattas. At the time, Perkins was a right-wing Republican state representative hailed by Reed as the legislature’s “anti-gambling leader.” As Perkins lobbied his colleagues against the riverboat bill, he pushed Reed to pour money into an aggressive phone-banking campaign to rally conservative Christian voters.

  Abramoff dumped a heap of “chump change” into Reed’s war chest for PR efforts against his clients’ rivals, the Jena Choctaws. The money supplemented the $10,000 in tribal gambling money that Abramoff funneled into Reed’s 2001 campaign to become chairman of the Georgia Republican Party and the millions he deposited into Reed’s personal account. Reed recruited Falwell to record a phone message against the bill and solicited the help of his former boss at the Christian Coalition, Pat Robertson, thanking him for his “leadership for our values.” Like the answering of a prayer, tens of thousands of Louisiana Republicans suddenly were bombarded with the voice of God against vice, intoned by Robertson and Falwell.

  On March 22, 2001, the bill was resoundingly defeated in the legislature. “You are the greatest!!!” an ecstatic Abramoff wrote Reed.

  Miracle accomplished, Abramoff tapped Reed’s services once again in January 2002, when his clients learned that then Louisiana governor Republican Mike Foster had approved a casino site for the Jena Choctaws. Following a battle plan devised by Scanlon (who inexplicably signed a memo outlining the plan “Mike ‘The Sausage King’ Scanlon”), Reed reenlisted his evangelical allies to rev up grassroots pressure on Gail Norton, then Bush’s interior secretary, who had the final say on the Jena deal.

  Reed first prompted Dobson to attack the Jenas’ lobbyist, Haley Barbour, during a Focus on the Family broadcast. (Months later, in his 2002 campaign for governor, Barbour touted himself as “a five-point Calvinist” on Dobson’s American Family Radio.)

  “Let me know when Dobson hits him,” Abramoff wrote Reed on February 6, 2002. “I want to savor it.” That same day, he e-mailed Scanlon, “He [Dobson] is going to hit Haley by name! He is going to encourage people to call Norton and the WH [White House]. This is going to get fun.”

  Abramoff transferred more cash to Reed to blast Dobson’s tirade against the Jena casino across Louisiana airwaves. Abramoff was confident that his Bush administration contacts would make sure all the right people heard Dobson’s hit. “Dobson goes up on the radio next week!” he told Scanlon on February 20. “We’ll play it in WH [the White House] and Interior.” Abramoff’s gamble paid off when w
ord of the ad filtered through the tension-filled halls of the Interior Department. “[White House liaison] Doug [Domenech] came to me and said, ‘Dobson’s going to shut down our phone system,’” an unnamed former Interior Department official recounted to the Washington Post. “‘He’s going to go on the air and tell everyone who listens to Focus on the Family to call Interior to oppose the Jena compact.’”

  But Abramoff’s fun didn’t stop there. Reed urged a Who’s Who of the Christian right to lobby Norton against the Jena compact with a stream of breathless and threatening letters. On February 19, Perkins warned Norton that gambling leads to “crime, divorce, child abuse.” American Family Association chairman Don Wildmon sent a lengthy missive to Norton filled with statistics on gambling’s adverse social impact. Veteran anti-feminist leader Phyllis Schlafly sent another. Gary Bauer, Dobson’s former protégé, now heading his own advocacy outfit, declared in a letter to Norton that the compact ran “contrary to President Bush’s pro-family vision.” Focus on the Family vice president Tom Minnery wrote Norton and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card to demand that they stop the deal. Dobson capped the mail blitz with his own letter against gambling expansion.

  Despite the best efforts of Abramoff and the Christian soldiers Reed had recruited, Norton approved the Jena compact. Haley Barbour’s clout proved to be greater. Soon, Louisiana’s new governor, Democrat Kathleen Blanco, reversed the deal on the basis of her opposition to casino growth. Abramoff’s mission accomplished thus became mission impossible. And his machinations were beginning to take an emotional toll. “I hate all the shit I’m into,” he moaned to Scanlon in a February 2003 e-mail. “I need to be on the Caribbean with you!”

  But Abramoff’s ordeal turned out to be a blessing for most of its Christian-right players. Perkins had had a chance to prove his mettle in a national campaign, prompting his appointment the following year by Dobson as president of the Family Research Council. Dobson, for his part, had demonstrated his grassroots pull to the Bush White House, raising his visibility to Karl Rove and helping him increase his influence over the Bush administration’s social agenda as the presidential election approached.

  Of the Christian-right activists involved in the Abramoff scandal, only Reed was tainted. When the Senate Indian Affairs Committee released Abramoff’s, Scanlon’s and Reed’s e-mails in late 2004, Reed was preparing the groundwork for a campaign to become lieutenant governor of Georgia, a stepping-stone on his planned path to higher office—governor, senator, and then even higher. But Reed was dogged with questions on the campaign trail about his business dealings with Abramoff. Reed went from denying that he had accepted gambling money to claiming unconvincingly that Abramoff had lied to him about the source of his fees.

  In order to generate a strong turnout for a stump speech at a Georgia Christian Coalition meeting, Reed was reduced to paying off his dwindling band of “supporters” with cash and free hotel rooms. In the end, Reed’s contorted answers were not enough to mollify Georgia’s Republican voters. On election night, his dreams of political grandeur ended in a landslide defeat; he lost the primary by twelve points. His face once having appeared on the cover of Time, his fall from grace was steep. At the Georgia Republican Party convention in 2007, presidential candidate Mitt Romney greeted Reed, “Why, it’s good to see Gary Bauer here.”

  When the full scope of the Abramoff casino scandal came to light, Jamie Dean, a young writer for Marvin Olasky’s conservative evangelical news magazine World, published a devastating exposé of Reed’s involvement. Olasky added his editorial voice to Dean’s reporting, proclaiming on his blog that Reed “has shamed the evangelical community by providing evidence for the generally untrue stereotype that evangelicals are easily manipulated and that evangelical leaders are using moral issues to line their own pockets.”

  Whereas Reed’s collusion with Abramoff was confirmed by documents subpoenaed by the Senate, Dobson’s involvement remained murky. Senate documents showed a clear link between Reed and Dobson, but the connection between Dobson and Abramoff, if there was one, remained unknown. Acknowledging collusion with a disgraced casino lobbyist would have been suicidal among Dobson’s followers. But there were also risks in Dobson’s casting himself as a useful idiot in Abramoff’s game. That would reveal the “pro-family” movement as just another gear in a sordid Republican political operation. Instead, Dobson denied any involvement at all, even claiming he had never been in contact with Reed, despite several Senate-subpoenaed e-mails that suggested he had.

  “Now, as it happens,” top Dobson flak Tom Minnery claimed on the February 17 edition of Focus on the Family, “we, Focus on the Family, were fighting this new Indian casino in Louisiana at the very same time. Not because Ralph Reed asked us. Not because Jack Abramoff asked us.”

  When Dean called Focus on the Family, hoping to clarify the nature of Dobson’s involvement in the scandal, and reported that Focus had essentially stonewalled her, she incurred Dobson’s wrath. In an angry letter to his supporters in April 2005, the Focus leader declared that Dean “added fuel to the fire of those on the left who welcomed any hint, however contrived, of impropriety at Focus on the Family.” Warren Smith, an editor for World, told me that in response to Dean’s factual reporting, Focus on the Family ordered its members to cancel their subscriptions, leading to the loss of thousands of readers. Within the authoritarian movement Dobson cultivated, dissent was forbidden and swiftly punished.

  When I reported on Dobson’s role in the Abramoff casino scandal for The Nation, Media Matters for America, and the Huffington Post, an ad hoc group called the Campaign to Defend the Constitution (Defcon) ran ads in Colorado Springs and Washington newspapers depicting Dobson, Reed, and Sheldon seated at a blackjack table across from Abramoff. I joined Defcon at a press conference with members of the Colorado media who were drawing attention to Dobson’s involvement in the scandal. Although I never accused Dobson of receiving money from Abramoff or having foreknowledge of his schemes, I raised the very same question World had asked: What did Dobson know and when did he know it?

  Focus on the Family responded to Defcon’s campaign by firing off a mass e-mail to its members that sounded a call to arms. “While this ad reads like an indictment against Dr. Dobson,” the e-mail said of Defcon’s commercial, “it is in reality a declaration of war against the entire pro-family movement.” The letter went on to identify various evildoers behind Defcon: the former president of a “pro-abortion” group, “‘religious left’ leaders,” “a homosexual pastor,” and of course George Soros. All the enemies of the Family were finally gathered in one convenient place.

  Within hours, my e-mail box was flooded with vitriolic messages from Focus on the Family followers. Two weeks later, the tide of angry e-mails rose to a total of nearly 7,000. These e-mails opened a window into the mentality of Dobson’s followers. I read as many as I could, searching for signs of dissent within the movement or, at least, some degree of variety among the opinions of its members. I found none. Those who wrote to express their outrage at me often claimed to owe their entire lives—their very existence—to Dobson. He was the magic father who had ushered them through the wilderness to a sanctuary of order, certainty, and meaning. Any criticism of Dobson, even criticism with a factual basis, threatened the paper-thin shell of protection that kept his supporters’ inner demons at bay.

  Highlighting the view of Dobson as a deity, Albert Tremaine of Carpinteria, California, e-mailed me with the subject line “Your lies about St. Jim Dobson.” “His focus is on helping families,” Tremaine reminded me. “Why are you so determined to destroy America?”

  Robert Ragle from Milford, Ohio, was so infuriated by Defcon’s activities that he challenged me to a duel. “Please, come to Ohio and introduce yourself to me and I’ll deal with you myself,” Ragle wrote. “You ‘people,’ and I use that term loosely, should be sued, arrested, and shipped out of the country.”

  Yolanda Glatfelter of Stockton, California, warned me that unless Ragl
e got to me first, the sin of criticizing Dobson would be punished during the Second Coming. “Sometimes I am thinking if these ACLU or these liberal Democrats still beleive in God,” Glatfelter mused in halting English. “Pres. Bush won the re-election bec. of the conservatives I wished they should opened up their eyes & their mind that there are signs that these world is about to end.”

  “The reasons why a person is bound to a magic helper are, in principle, the same that we have found at the root of the symbiotic [sadomasochistic] drives: an inability to stand alone and to fully express his own individual potentialities,” Erich Fromm wrote in Escape from Freedom. The e-mails I received from Dobson’s flock were perfect documents of the symbiosis of sadism (punishing evildoers and subversives who deserve no mercy) and masochism (bowing before a higher force) that authoritarian followers so often display.

  Dobson weathered the Abramoff casino scandal, but not by establishing his innocence through documented evidence. Instead, he cast himself as the victim hero in an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. His followers reveled in the drama he had created for them, rushing to the trenches at his orders to defend him against the enemies of the movement. Although increased awareness of Dobson’s machinations might have harmed him in the eyes of outsiders, his position at the helm of the Christian right was only strengthened.

  Having survived the slings and arrows of critics, Dobson now mobilized his troops to defend Tom DeLay from calls for his resignation and criminal charges. But under DeLay’s direction, the battle to save his career morphed into a grim passion play revolving around the fate of a clinically brain-dead woman in Florida.

  CHAPTER 13

  TALK TO HER

  Terri Schiavo, a forty-one-year-old Florida woman, had been in a persistent vegetative state since 1990 when she suddenly lost consciousness as the result of an eating disorder. When Florida circuit court judge George Greer, a Republican, approved a petition in 2000 by her husband and legal guardian, Michael Schiavo, to have Terri’s feeding tube removed, her case became a flashpoint of righteous rage for the Christian right.