Onward Christian Fraudsters

The G.O.P. is having its own St. Ralph troubles:

"You know that song about the Rhinestone Cowboy, 'There's been a load of compromising on the road to my horizon,' " Mr. Robertson said. "The Bible says you can't serve God and Mammon."

I was thinking Midnight Cowboy, but that works too.

In Georgia, Mr. Reed's rival in the Republican primary is playing up his links with Indian casinos to try to revive longstanding criticism from conservative Christian purists that Mr. Reed has sometimes put his own ambitions ahead of their goals. At the meeting near Atlanta, for example, his opponents were doing their best to sow doubts in the crowd.

"The Christian Coalition, they may have some shady background," said Robert McIntyre, the treasurer of the Spalding County Republican Party, who still wore a Ralph Reed sticker on his lapel. "I was being loyal to Ralph Reed, but since now some things have come up, I need to listen. I am now wavering."

But Ralph's still got some support:

Bill Paxon, a former Congressman turned lobbyist who worked closely with Mr. Reed on Republican Congressional campaigns, said Mr. Reed was a man of many dimensions: a heartfelt Christian, a limited-government conservative and a canny political street fighter. "He was always all of the above," Mr. Paxon said.

Bill Paxon? Is that the best you can do, Ralph?

Soon after he left the organization in 1997, it nearly imploded as financial problems came to light. Mr. Reed's successors said that the Christian Coalition had exaggerated the size of its grass-roots network, had spent far too much of its income on raising new funds and had fallen $3 million in debt.

Exaggerated? As in fraud, exaggerated?

In Georgia, some conservative Christians were troubled by Mr. Reed's consulting work for Mitch Skandalakis, a losing candidate for lieutenant governor who ran advertisements portraying one rival in racial stereotypes and another as a drug addict. (Mr. Reed said afterward that he opposed racially divisive tactics.)

Some? Not all?

After a Texas court ruled against the Tiguas' casino on Feb. 11, 2002, Mr. Abramoff wrote to Mr. Reed in a celebratory e-mail message: "I wish those moronic Tiguas were smarter in their political contributions. I'd love us to get our mitts on that moolah."

But racially divisive e-mails are hunky dory.

As the Senate committee and a federal task force in Washington investigate Mr. Abramoff's lobbying activities, Mr. Reed has said little publicly about his role in the casino campaign. He recently retained Neil Eggleston, a lawyer for the Clinton White House, to represent him.

Smart move.

In Georgia, Mr. Reed's primary opponent, State Senator Casey Cagle, criticized him last week for inviting at least three lobbyists whose firms have worked for gambling concerns to a Washington fund-raiser tomorrow.

"Ralph has a lot of things he has got to answer for, like this gambling situation," said Joel McElhannon, a consultant to Mr. Cagle's campaign. "It strains believability that somebody hands him $4.2 million and he doesn't know where that money came from."

Miracles do happen.