Check out this
hilarious piece by Bruce Reed on Mitt Romney's travails in courting the Christian Right. He apparently mistook Gary Bauer for Ralph Reed at a recent fundraiser, which is really pretty preposterous, as (Bruce) Reed notes:
But mistaking Ralph Reed for Gary Bauer at your own fund-raiser is like going to a
Star Wars convention and mixing up Luke Skywalker and Yoda. Bauer is
short, bug-eyed, and tight-lipped. No one noticed his 2000 primary bid until he fell off the stage at a pancake-flipping event in New Hampshire. Reed is lanky, with narrow, shifty eyes and a
big, plastic grin.
Bruce Reed also notes the ideological distinctions: "Bauer is a true believer, while Reed is a shameless opportunist," he writes, but both are "religious-right has-beens." The question in this campaign, however, is how much of a has-been is the
movement that Bauer and Reed and
Jerry Falwell built. I bet Mitt Romney would like to know.