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To Arthur Kropp, the liberal Republican who heads People for the American Way, Reed is a more dangerous adversary than earlier religious-right leaders precisely because he knows when to be flexible. "He shows good political sense," Kropp says, "learning as he goes." But Reed's suppleness in strategy doesn't mean that his or his movement's basic goals have changed. Like other friends, Roberta Combs, the Christian Coalition leader in South Carolina, has no doubt of his constancy. "I consider him the Christian Lee Atwater," she says -- high praise in the home state of the late conservative G.O.P. leader. Like Atwater and other legendary Southern pols, Reed combines a bent for the long view with an intense desire to win the fracas de jour. But Reed, with his innocent good looks and radio announcer's diction, is a much smoother article.
He attributes his ability to adapt to his upbringing. Ralph Eugene Reed Sr. was a Navy doctor training to be a surgeon when Ralph Jr. was born in Portsmouth, Virginia -- a few blocks away from Pat Robertson's first broadcast studio. When the boy entered high school in Toccoa, in northern Georgia, it was the seventh town (and fifth state) that the family had called home. By then little Buddy Reed had learned three things about himself: he could fit in quickly, loved history and had a gift for politics.
He liked people and books rather than sports and rock 'n' roll. He consumed biographies of Presidents and remembers being awed by William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. "It showed me at an early age -- I was about eight -- the impact of politics," Reed recalls. "I learned that politics had serious consequences for millions of people, a life-and-death business." But it could also be fun. In junior high school, outside Miami, his posters when he ran for student council president read, ELECT RALPH REED, THE LITTLE GIANT. Most kids didn't get the allusion to Stephen Douglas, but they liked the play on Reed's slight stature. He won the election.
At the University of Georgia, Reed went out for the debating society, the College Republicans and the newspaper, the Red and Black, where he eventually had a weekly column. "He was a fire-eating Republican," recalls Mike Tidwell, who worked on the paper, "on the far right of every issue. But he was provocative and entertaining, like Rush Limbaugh today." Reed also rushed up the leadership ladder, winning the chairmanship of the College Republicans at his school, then of the statewide organization. In the summer of 1981, as Reaganomics was being enacted, he served as a Senate intern, then remained in the capital for a semester working with the National College Republicans. Returning to school in 1982, he felt imbued with "a mission, a purpose. I knew what I was about. There was no ambiguity." The mission was to make campus conservatives as active and iconoclastic as liberals had been for years. The favored means was to mount demonstrations and petition drives that stimulated adrenaline, and Reed was a natural at that.