Ralph Reed now has to pay to get people to come to his political meetings:
Ralph Reed wants a good crowd at today's annual gathering of the Christian Coalition of Georgia. And he's willing to shell out cash for it.
His Republican campaign for lieutenant governor sent an e-mail to supporters this week offering to pay the $20 entrance fee and — for out-of-towners — an overnight stay in a hotel.
Reed campaign manager Jared Thomas characterized the offer as routine. "Certainly, we want our grass-roots people to be well-represented," he said.
Well, sure, every political candidate wants to see their activist supporters at a campaign event. But consider the context here: we're talking about a Christian Coalition of Georgia meeting. In a church. Reed, the religious-right golden boy, should be in a position in which he's turning away supporters at the door because there's just too many of them. Instead, he's sending out last-minute emails offering to pay people to show up.
Reed has been one of the major leaders of the radical fundamentalist cleric attack on our rights and way of life. He must have thought that his own way of life can stay unchanged by all this as he decided to get involved in the Abramoff scandal. But the Bible has disapproving bits about that sort of behavior, too.