Con Artist Ralph Reed Hopes to Nudge Mitt Romney to a Victory [View all]

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/us/politics/ralph-reed-hopes-to-nudge-mitt-romney-to-a-victory.html

An Evangelical Back From Exile, Lifting Romney
By JO BECKER

...Just six years ago, the man who turned the Christian Coalition into such a powerful political force that he was called “God’s right-hand man” was all but written off, tarnished by his ties to the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, then trounced in his campaign to become Georgia’s lieutenant governor. But after several years in political purgatory, Mr. Reed has found his way back.

At the Republican convention in Tampa, Fla., he was sought after by party luminaries and afforded the ultimate status accommodation, a room in the same hotel as Mitt Romney. And soon he plans to unleash a sophisticated, microtargeted get-out-the-evangelical-vote operation that he believes could nudge open a margin of victory if Mr. Romney can keep the race close.

The other day, sitting in an office lined with framed photographs from back in the heyday — here with President George W. Bush at a White House Christmas party, there with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican — the preternaturally youthful evangelical operative, 51, propped his black ostrich cowboy boots on a coffee table and made what he admits seems an audacious prediction: that record numbers of socially conservative evangelical Protestants will turn out for the first presidential election in history without a Protestant on the Republican ticket.

“God,” he said with a laugh, “has a sense of humor.”