How to Win Like a Conservative

"'Don't you know he's a fag?' Tommy must have said a dozen times before the meeting.... For some people, even the GOP is too diverse a community. Anyone with first-hand knowledge of the upper levels of the Republican power structure knows it could give the audience at a Rent marathon a run for its money. So you'd think party hacks like Tommy would have gotten over it by now."

——Allen Raymond, How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative [1]

In a witty touch, the cover of former Republican operative Allen Raymond's new memoir sports a nifty design feature: On the title How to Win an Election, the word "Win" is crossed out. He's changed his mind; he's going to tell the truth. Over the word "Win" is inscribed "Rig."

Raymond's a stylish writer—or perhaps it's his ghostwriter who's a stylish writer—and a smart guy, so I'd like to fancy the title as a bit of a homage to a great right-wing hustler of the past: Stephen Shadegg, who ran Barry Goldwater's Senate campaigns in corrosively manipulative fashion, and published a book in 1964 bragging about it called How to Win An Election. The book became the subject of a thundering New York Times editorial scoring Shadegg's "sublime indifference to all considerations of decency and fairness," and also Shadegg's admission that his secret weapon was borrowing Mao Tse-Tung's technique of infiltrating villages using "cell groups."

"Will he recruit such groups this year from among the Minutemen...which trains its members in guerrilla warfare against a possible Commnist takeover?" the Times asked. "They have pledged to support the Republican nominee thorugh the use of just such infiltration methods, and Mr. Goldwater has not repudiated them."

What goes around comes around: our own modern-day Minutemen—which trains its members in guerrilla warfare against a possible Mexican takeover—have endorsed Mike Huckabee, and Mr. Huckabee has not repudiated them. Truly inspiring, the conservative movement's commitment to historical continuity in these fast-changing times.

Anyway, back to Mr. Raymond. He went to jail for what he did to rig an election on behalf of orders from the Republican National Committee. More on that later. I want to start by writing about how frankly this book—which everyone should buy and read—exposes the absolute, abject horror that the culture of one of our two great American political parties has become. It's a tell-all, and Mr. Raymond truly tells all:

In GOP circles in 2002 it seemed preposterous that anything you did to win an election could be considered a crime. For ten years I'd been making phone calls with the intent to manipulate voters; hell, I'd been handsomely rewarded for it. In my business, communication devices were all lethal weapons—and every fight was dirty.... Even the guys who didn't expose undercover CIA operatives, proposition congressional pages, and send other people's children off to die in an impossible war wouldn't rat on the ones who did.... I was truly beginning to understand how few metaphysical limitations a person is up against once he decides that the truth is what he makes it. From then on, two plus two would equal whatever sum I found most useful."

At one point he reflects on the novelty that he was about to take out his opponent with the truth. "Still, the truth needs the most careful handling of all; it always comes with a lot of inconvenient facts that could lessen its value in the hands of an amateur." His client's opponent, it turns out, had covered up an incident in which he ran over a cop and dragged him around a parking lot, crippling him. His client makes as if he has just learned this--but knew it all along. "He'd been planning this whole thing and waited until the polls had us in a dead heat to use it.... I didn't know whether to be horrified or impressed.

"In the end, I couldn't help but admire the man."

Here is what it takes to become a Republican operative: Avoid your clients' spouses. "[T]hey always reminded me of the candidate's humanity, which hampered my ability to remain cold and calculating."

And Raymond is quite explicit that "both sides do it" is a myth: " When it came to playing in the gutter, we were the professionals—the Dems weren't even junior varsity."

These conservatives are a charming bunch, all right. When our hero asks for an extra two days for his honeymoon—he hasn't had a vacation in years—his congressman boss bellows in front of all his coworkers, "What the fuck? He's been fucking her for seven years! What's he need another two days for?"

He also acknowledges that the name of the game for Republicans is making sure as few ordinary people vote as possible—by way of telling the story of the time an Exxon lobbyist handed him a fat check in his boss's congressional office, and was incredulous at his scruples when, following federal law, Raymond insisted on waiting until they were off federal property (on the curb in front of the Capitol, to be exact) to accept it. "He looked at me like I was out of my mind, then handed over the check."

He demonstrates pretty damned convincingly that the fine phrases about good government in Newt Gingrich's Contract for America were but a carnival hustler's come on. New congressman Sonny Bono stands up at a caucus meeting and enthuses about the Republicans' chance to clean up government. "'How in God's name,' we wondered, 'did this nutty hippie get to be one of us?'... The Southerners just weren't going to do that. They had a mandate. Their strategy was to play to the base at all costs." He was, indeed, incredulous to see them take up the Lewinsky impeachment as their defining issue—"hate-based nonsense," he thought. He thought "they'd all gone nuts."

The dirtiest fights, of course, are between Republicans. When he joins the Steve Forbes campaign in 2000 tasked with gathering petition signatures in New York, he rents an unfindable office in Queens, installing a security camera and 24-hour security guards and triple-locked doors and fireproof filing cabinets for the room containing the petitions, whose walls he also festoons with fire-proof blankets. "It's not enough to know how to fight dirty against the competition; you've also to prevent them from using those unsavory tactics against you."

The competition is Karl Rove and company, about which more later. You'll have to buy the book to learn the Bush campaign's actual unsavory tactics against Forbes in 2000. No spoilers.

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As for that age-old question—do right-wing operatives believe their own propaganda?—for his part, Raymond doesn't. Chalking up the 1994 Gingrich windfall to Bill Clinton's '93 tax hike, he wonders, "Who would have thought that we could convince so many blue-collar workers that raising taxes primarily on white-collar workers was intrinsically wicked enough that they and other voters should give us both the House and the Senate?"

He holds the Evangelical base in utter contempt—providing, in timely fashion, useful insight on why the Republican establishment is so horrified by the ascendency of Preacher Mike Huckabee, the Happy Mullah. "The mouth-breathers who decide GOP primaries might allow people who steal their money and send their children to impossible wars to get away with anything, but they'll cut no such slack for baby-killers," Raymond writes. But if that's the political hand he was dealt, that was the hand he was willing to pay—in one case learning a West Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate who dared sponsored a bill to support a course on human development for school kids, then laundering RNC and National Republican Senatorial Committee money for an "independent" issues ad proclaiming: "Charlotte Pitt proposed teaching first-graders about condoms. Surprised? You shouldn't be. Senator Pritt also voted to permit the sale of pornographic videos to children." (His own candidate was "able to claim total ignorance of the ad's origins, because it ended with the line 'Paid for by the West Virginia State Victory Committee.") He fantasizes about telling another client—this one is running for Republican National Cmomittee co-chair—"Show up with a fetus in a jar and you might stand a chance." Instead, his—successful—strategy is to uncover a donation she once made to Jesse Helms' African-American opponent Harvey Gantt, slipping the relevant FEC documents under every RNC delegate's hotel room door.

If that's the contempt he harbors for RNC members—the party elite—you can imagine how he talks about "the Jesus-loves-guns crowd" with their "pro-life, snake-handling babble" and "religious doggerel." In one memorable phrase, he regrets he did it all just "so some platitude-spewing hack could be elected Grand Cyclops"—thus, from the inside, weighing in on the debate over whether today's conservative movement is racist or not: "Grand Cyclops" is the title for the leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

He's rather thrilled to be able to demonstrate just how authoritarian-minded these "knuckle-draggers" are, picking up his cell phone from the Republican convention, telling him to watch his TV set, then barking "U-S-A! U-S-A!" while pumping his fist in the air.

Soon the whole section has picked up the chant: "That shit's fucking scary, man!" his friend says. Responds Raymond: "What else do you want them to say?"

After which, he he gathers the evidence to conclude that the "convention for the 'families values' Party was, in the end, really just a sweaty, slippery boozefest that put some of your less temperate frats to shame. Walking back to my hotel after the 'Melee for Haley' fund-raiser, I found one of my esteemed colleagues face-down in a puddle of mud. This guy was forty-five years old and the mud was literally bubbling around his face because the son of a bitch was drowning in it. I picked him up, strapped him to a golf cart where the clubs belonged, and drove what was left of him right into the lobby of his hotel."

But make no mistake, they're godly drunks. Preciously, he recalls the first time he saw "a grown man at the height of power wearing a dainty little charm bracelet." It's the RNC's political director, at his job interview, and Raymond's wife has to explain to him that the letters on the bracelet—WWJD?—stand for "What Would Jesus Do?"

WWRND? Raymond soon learns. Tune in next time, same rat time, same rat channel.