Ralph Reed‘s Faith And Freedom Coalition, whose goal it is to recruit and register Republicans and Evangelicals and Tea Party members to vote for Mitt Romney, sent registered Republicans a questionnaire (but, really, a list-builder and fundraising tool) called the “Voter Registration Confirmation Survey” which mentions President Obama’s “Communist beliefs” and asks if Obama’s policies, actions, and agenda are more serious than Nazi Germany or the Japanese in World War II, the U.S. Civil War, and/or the Soviet Union. Respondents are told they can “mark as many answers as you think appropriate.”
Reed, the disgraced Jack Abramoff-linked lobbyist who once was the executive director of the Christian Coalition and also served the George W. Bush White House, was partially credited for Bush’s defeat of Senator John McCain, and was involved in an Indian gaming scandal.
“A copy of this so-called ‘Voter Registration Confirmation Survey’ was obtained by Mother Jones after it was sent to the home of a registered Republican voter,” Andy Kroll at Mother Jones reports today:
Reed was a longtime friend of Abramoff’s, and he took payments from Abramoff to lobby against certain American Indian casinos. Reed once ran a religious-themed anti-gambling campaign at the behest of an Abramoff-connected Native American tribe to try to prevent another tribe from opening a competitor casino. His current efforts for Romney are something of a political rehabilitation for Reed. Reed is Romney’s best hope for rallying evangelical voters. The religious right is a sizable voting bloc: 26 percent of the electorate in 2008. Reed was credited with propelling the evangelical vote in the 2004 for George W. Bush and helping Bush beat Democratic Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). And Romney needs Reed’s kind of help. During the GOP primary, evangelicals tended to prefer Romney’s opponents Newt Gingrich and especially Rick Santorum, and over the summer, enthusiasm among evangelicals for Romney was noticeably lacking.
As the New York Times recently reported, the Faith and Freedom Coalition intends to spend between $10 million and $12 million this election cycle. FFC aims to mobilize 17 million right-leaning, religious voters it has compiled in a database using sophisticated microtargeting methods, Reed said, using phone calls and mailers. Reed’s master plan calls for more than 5,000 volunteers to make contact with millions of voters in person, with 25 million voter guides being distributed at 117,000 churches around the country before Election Day.
And this mailer is a piece of this ambitious endeavor. Accompanied by a donation solicitation, the Faith and Freedom Coalition direct-mail piece asks a series of leading, anti-Obama questions. Obamacare, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, and Cuba’s Fidel Castro all figure prominently in the missive. The most contentious question may be one comparing Obama’s policies to the threat of Nazi Germany and Japan during the second World War.
Truly disgusting.
If Mitt Romney’s mainstream supporters knew about this, would they still vote for him?
Image, top, by Gage Skidmore