Can the people of Georgia save me from my evil twin?

Monday, July 17, 2006

Doubletake:The other day, a Republican acquaintance introduced me to his wife the same way Republicans almost always do. "Honey," he said, "This is Ralph Reed."

For the past 15 years, I have lived under the ultimate political curse: I think like Bill Clinton, but I look like Ralph Reed.

When politicos first started confusing Ralph and me, it was merely a glitch in their mental Rolodex. With the same last name, we were political homonyms, like John Kerry and Bob Kerrey. When a pundit wrote about "Bruce Reed's Christian Coalition," he didn't even know what I looked like; his mind just pulled up the first entry under the right last name.

But after Ralph's face appeared on the cover of Time in 1995, it became harder to deny the similarity. We met for the first time at a White House Correspondents Dinner—both of us guests at the same table and dressed in black tie. It was a little like the scene in The Parent Trap when twins separated since birth meet at summer camp—except that in the movie, the same actress plays both characters. Ralph and I looked at each other with absolutely no desire to see the resemblance.

Over time, I got used to being accidentally called Ralph whenever I accidentally wandered into conservative territory, especially in the South. I even thought we could try debating each other on cable, to see what happens when you cross a Doublemint commercial and Crossfire. Still, I was secretly delighted when Ralph left the Christian Coalition to start his own consulting firm, accepting a lower profile in return for higher pay.

The Shadow: Alas, Ralph did not go quietly. He worked so hard making money—"humping in corporate accounts," he called it in an e-mail to Jack Abramoff—that he became a profile in scandal. Then he decided to double his bet by becoming a scandal-plagued candidate for lieutenant governor in Georgia, which holds its primary tomorrow.

By any objective standard, the evidence mounting against Ralph Reed should be enough to stop him in the primary and doom him in the general. So far, his campaign has been one long apology for smarmy, hypocritical avarice that in retrospect he regrets.

When you're Ralph Reed's doppelganger, however, you lose no matter what. If somehow Ralph wins the primary and rides the incumbent Republican governor's coattails to victory in November, he'll be the odds-on favorite to become governor of Georgia in 2010 and seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 or 2016. That's bad news for Georgia, the country—and me. It will only be a matter of time before I snap after some youngster sees me hiding behind a newspaper and shouts, "Mommy, there's President Reed!"

But the shadow of Ralph will dog me even if he loses. Every day, I live in fear that one of the tribes that Ralph Reed and Jack Abramoff shafted will come settle their debt with me by mistake.