000d71h42.thumbnail.jpgCourtesy of Fox, proud American Ralph Reed takes strong exception to Michelle Obama's statement about pride. Concern troll for us, Ralph.

On the February 19 edition of Fox News' The Big Story with Gibson & Nauert, during a discussion of comments made by Michelle Obama, wife of Sen. Barack Obama, Republican strategist and former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed asserted, "[T]he reason why I think this isn't going to go away, unless she apologizes quickly, is because it plays into a stereotype about the left wing of the Democratic Party, that it blames America first, that they don't see the greatness of America, and it really makes me wonder as somebody who is roughly about Barack and Michelle's age, what country she grew up in."

Fair enough. Let's explore the country Michelle Obama grew up in through the prism of that political parable of our times who is Ralph Reed.

Just some high points, so you can see the country Ralph is proud to think he's lived in these past 25 years or so.

Let's see: Ralph contributes an article to his college newspaper attacking Gandhi and the Richard Attenborough movie biography of his life with the evocative title "Gandhi: Ninny [?] of the 20th century.", which, unfortunately, he plagiarized from an article in Commentary.

Ralph finds Jesus in a bar, just in time to join the nascent evangelical movement in Republican politics

Robertson hires Ralph Reed, a 29-year-old Republican activist, to run the Coalition. Reed tells the Los Angeles Times, "What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time and one state at a time. I honestly believe that in my lifetime, we will see a country once again governed by Christians...and Christian values (April 1990)

Ralph uses tax-free "religious" Christian Coalition funds to illegally provide direct electoral support for Republican candidates

in the course of which they produce this

In a move that has been criticized as lacking racial sensitivity, the Christian Coalition has distributed a sample of an election pamphlet with photographs depicting a fictitious white candidate espousing views favored by the conservative religious organization and another fictional candidate, who is black, opposing them.

Christian Coalition officials, who, in recent months, have sought to improve relations with blacks, said they were embarrassed and chagrined by the sample pamphlets and said they had stopped sending them out last week.

Ralph Reed, the group's executive director, said that he had faxed a letter of apology to the head of the branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Texas, where the sample had been widely distributed.

He added that he had tried, so far without success, to call civil rights leaders such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Kweisi Mfume, the national leader of the N.A.A.C.P., to express his regret over the incident.

The pamphlet is a sample of the evangelical group's 1996 voter guide for state and Congressional elections. On the cover is a picture of ''John Doe.'' Under his photograph are positions he champions: support for a balanced budget amendment, backing of vouchers to allow parents to send children to private and religious schools, support for school prayer and opposition to ''homosexual adoption of children.''

All the positions taken by John Doe are in line with those advocated by the Christian Coalition.

Across the page from Mr. Doe is a picture of a black candidate, ''Joe Sample.'' He supports ''abortion on demand,'' opposes term limits for Congress, supports ''taxpayer funding of obscene art'' and opposes every position the coalition favors.

It was a completely post-racial mistake, though, because, he assured us, nobody in the office could tell the second guy was black (I'm actually not kidding about that).

and then there's this

The "nonpartisan" Coalition accepts a $64,000 donation from the Republican Senatorial Committee and uses it to intervene in a North Carolina Senate race between Republican Jesse Helms and Democrat Harvey Gantt. [At a closed-door meeting of Coalition activists in November 1991, Reed brags that after Helms called Robertson for help, he blanketed the state with 750,000 voter guides and helped Helms win.] (November 1990)

and what, you may wonder, did the Helms campaign need $64k for in the last days of that campaign against Gantt?

Thought you'd never ask.

Running against a black opponent, former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt, Helms was trailing in the closing days of the election. The spot, which Castellanos produced on a Sunday and had on-air the next day, featured a white man sitting at a table, with the camera's focus on his hands, angrily crumpling up a job rejection notice, as a narrator says: "You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota." Then the on-screen image of the rejection letter faded to a picture of Gantt, as the man's white hands, for a split second, appear to be crushing Gantt's head.

You'll be amazed to hear that Alex Castellanos, the man who made the ad, also purports to be color blind, just like (I know you saw this coming) Martin Luther King.

Or how about this: Jack Abramoff had the money, most of it the result of padding the bills he sent to his clients, Native American gambling tribes (or as he referred to them, "monkeys," "troglodytes" and "morons"). Ralph Reed, his BFF from their college Republican days, had the access to the White House through contacts he made in his Christian Coalition days. Ralph leads his Christian followers in a crusade against native american casinos which he, but not they, knew was being financed by Jack Abramoff's tribal gaming clients. The folks on Mr. Reed's Christian mailing list thought he was doing it because gambling was a cancer which stole food from the mouths of children (mostly because Reed told them so).

This tracks with what Mr. Reed's and Mr. Abramoff's ally Mr. Scanlon had to say about the role of the religious right in Republican politics

Michael Scanlon … explained the strategy in an e-mail to a tribal client. “Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them,” he wrote. “The wackos get their information [from] the Christian right, Christian radio, e-mail, the internet and telephone trees.”

Worked like this

In early 2002 the Coushatta tribe of Louisiana was desperately trying to kill a planned competing casino that the rival Jena Band wanted to build in southwestern Louisiana. This new casino would have broken the Coushattas' geographical monopoly and cost the tribe--whose casino was grossing $300 million a year-- an estimated $1 billion in gambling revenue over five years. The Jena Band had hired former GOP national chairman Haley Barbour to make sure its casino compact was approved by the heavily politicized Bureau of Indian Affairs. So the Coushatta tribe, which already was in the process of paying Abramoff and Scanlon some $32 million over three years, also hired Reed, according to three witnesses and documents obtained by The Nation. This was not a crime, just furtive hypocrisy.

Two casino industry lobbyists--Philip Thompson and Bill Grimes--say they were in a meeting in Baton Rouge early in 2002 and heard William Worfel, vice chair of the Coushatta tribe, say he was hiring Reed to lobby for the tribe with the BIA to neutralize the influence Barbour had with the Bush Administration. According to Thompson, Worfel, who also did not return phone calls, "said he was putting Reed on his payroll. He said, 'If they have Barbour, we need Reed.'" A third casino lobbyist at the meeting, who requested anonymity, says Reed helped "mobilize Christian radio and ministers against the casino." But, he says, "He wanted to be able to deny it. Or if it came out, he wanted to be able to claim he was against the Jena casino, without anybody knowing he was getting paid by a bigger tribe with a bigger gambling operation."

The documents obtained by The Nation show that Reed sent bills to Abramoff and Scanlon and that one of his consulting companies, Century Strategies of Duluth, Georgia, received $250,000 from one of Scanlon's companies, Capitol Campaign Strategies. An invoice to Abramoff from another Reed company, Capitol Media, for $100,000, states only that the payment is for "Louisiana Project Mgmt. Fee." (The main thrust of the Justice Department investigation involves money laundering among Scanlon, Abramoff and Republican campaigns. Abramoff was fired by his firm for not disclosing $10 million in payments from Scanlon.)

Reed's involvement with the casino effort followed his departure from the Christian Coalition in 1997 and his reinvention of himself as a corporate lobbyist and campaign hatchet man. One of his first clients was the Enron Corporation--a deal arranged by Karl Rove when George W. Bush was starting to think about running for President in 2000. Rove wasn't ready to put Reed directly on a campaign payroll but presumably wanted to cultivate good will from Reed toward the coming Bush candidacy. Enron paid Reed's Century Strategies more than $300,000 to generate support for energy deregulation. In the 2000 GOP presidential primary, Reed justified his big Enron fee by helping to smear John McCain during the South Carolina primary. Now McCain's Indian Affairs subcommittee is investigating Indian gambling in the context of lobbying abuses, kickbacks and money laundering, with public hearings scheduled for early September.

I think, though, that working on behalf of gambling is pretty innocuous stuff compared to his collaboration with Abramoff on behalf of sex slavery, sweatshop labor and forced abortions.

In August 1999, political organizer Ralph Reed's firm sent out a mailer to Alabama conservative Christians asking them to call then-Rep. Bob Riley (R-Ala.) and tell him to vote against legislation that would have made the U.S. commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands subject to federal wage and worker safety laws.

Now those seven-year-old words are coming back to haunt Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition and a candidate for the Republican nomination to be Georgia's lieutenant governor.

"The radical left, the Big Labor Union Bosses, and Bill Clinton want to pass a law preventing Chinese from coming to work on the Marianas Islands," the mailer from Reed's firm said. The Chinese workers, it added, "are exposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ" while on the islands, and many "are converted to the Christian faith and return to China with Bibles in hand."

A year earlier, the Department of the Interior -- which oversees federal policy toward the U.S. territory -- presented a very different picture of life for Chinese workers on the islands. An Interior report found that Chinese women were subject to forced abortions and that women and children were subject to forced prostitution in the local sex-tourism industry.

It also alleged that the garment industry and other businesses set up facilities on the Northern Marianas to produce products labeled "Made in the USA," while importing workers from China and other Asian countries and paying them less than U.S. minimum wage under conditions not subject to federal safety standards.

Lisa Baron, a spokeswoman for Reed's campaign, said Millennium Marketing "was hired as a direct-mail subcontractor to assist in encouraging grass-roots citizens to promote the propagation of the gospel."

"As a defender of the unborn, Ralph was unaware of any allegations regarding inhumane or illegal treatment of workers, and he would strongly object to such practices, if true," she added.

He lost, by the way. By a wide, wide margin.

I guess it's a proud thing for Ralph that he and people like him have been on the top of American politics for the last thirty years or so, and I guess it kinda sucks for him that one of his pet tactics, race baiting "wackos" on behalf of crooks, seems not to be working out this time.

It's a pretty damn good reason for the rest of us to be proud of our country in a new way.

And yes, that includes the candidate's wife.