The Man Who Wasn’t There

By Elisabeth Bumiller
NYT

Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition and an associate of the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, was a no-show at a fund-raiser for Senator John McCain in Atlanta on Monday night, even though Mr. Reed had sent out e-mail messages asking people to attend. Mr. Reed’s absence quickly threw Senator Barack Obama’s campaign, which had seized on Mr. Reed’s ties to Mr. McCain, into I-told-you-so jubilation.

“Faced with the embarrassing prospect of holding a fund-raiser with one of Jack Abramoff’s closest associates, the McCain campaign scrambled today to scratch Ralph Reed from tonight’s program,” Tommy Vietor, an Obama spokesman, said in a statement. He added that “the real question isn’t why Reed isn’t showing up, but why a so-called reformer would invite him at all.”