How to Win Like a Republican (2)

On Monday I unfurled Part I [1] of Allen Raymond's memoir How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative. Here, for your delection, is part deux, the thrilling conclusion. So how did Allen Raymond end up in jail? And what does it say about our friends the conservatives?

It starts with a $50,000 loan from Haley Barbour. I love Haley Barbour—he's truly an "Only in the Republican Party" kind of cat. First he rises to power as a Mississippi congressman, then Republican National Committee chair, all as a tribune of sturdy, upright conservative morality. Then he sets himself up as one of the most high-dollar lobbyists in Washington, including a turn selling advice about how American businesses can profit from war-torn Iraq. Then he sells himself to the people of Mississippi as governor—again, as a tribune of sturdy, upright conservative morality.

Only in the Republican Party, folks.

Anyway. It's 2000, and our hero Raymond, a successful young campaign consultant specializing in telemarketing and direct mail is between engagements, having worked for Steve Forbes' ill-fated bid for the Republican nomination. He needs an idea for a business. He scotches his first one, an online exchange where the RNC and various state parties could trade the two kinds of campaign currency, hard money and soft money, like they were Euros or Yen. Too cynical, it turns out. "What are you, fucking crazy?" a friend snorts. "This is the stuff that's supposed to happen in the dark of the night.

He comes up with another idea: brokering phone-banking services for campaigns, helping match demand for the kind of nasty, smearing phone calls he specializes in with the limited supply of "call centers in the United States staffed by accent-neutral Americans." Which, in the milieu within which he thrives, is apparently not too cynical at all.

He's cruising along quite ably, thanks to the $50,000 in seed money from RNC chair Barbour, when he runs into a bit of a jam: he holds George W. Bush ("a Connecticut-raised cowboy who'd been blind drunk until he was forty and who'd failed at every private-sector job his father ever got him") rather in contempt, and during the presidential campaign was not shy about letting the rest of the party know it. Not a good idea, given how the Republican Party rolls. He tells one story of what a Dole fund-raiser (he names names: Mark Miller) told him in 1996: "Once I'm in the White House, I can get even with everyone."

Now what Raymond calls "Bush's goon squad" are in the White House, and are eager to get even with him.

His business is frozen out— by, he suspects, Karl Rove himself, the "king of direct mail smear campaigns." He's desperate for business when manna arrives from heaven. An agent of the RNC, Jim Tobin, calls him up with a curious request: "If I had a couple of phone numbers that I wanted to shut down on Election Day, could you do that?"

He could. Though first he runs things by a Republican election lawyer—a former general counsel to the Federal Election Committee, in fact. The numbers are of Democratic phone banks designed to help get people to the polls for the 2002 New Hampshire gubernatorial election. The lawyer tells him he can't find anything illegal about wiping out this capacity by flooding them with calls. "For me that was a green light," Raymond writes. "Throughout my career, 'It's not illegal' was always enough to march with.... In ten years no one in my professional ife had ever questioned my ethics. It had literally never came up."

What's more, he reflects, "the fact that the call came from the RNC is the reason I didn't just dismiss the idea out of hand. The Bush White House had complete control fo the RNC and there was no way someone like Tobin was going to try what he was proposing without first getting it vetted by his higher-ups. That's if Tobin, rather than one of his bosses, had even thought of the ploy himself—which seemed unlikely."

Famous last words.

Raymond presumes this is his Binding of Isaac moment: the Bushies are testing him, to see how far he's willing to go for the team. He's not about to turn down the work; he needs to be welcomed back into The Family. His livelihood depends on it. Once in, he'll be under their protection.

That's our man Raymond's Achilles heel: he trusts these people to protect him.

Election Day. He runs the phone-jamming operation for an hour, then gets a desperate call from the executive director of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee, the man who hired him, to shut the thing down post haste. It turns out one of the phone banks belongs to the New Hampshire firefighters union. The Granite State's Bravest, livid, turn him in to the cops. It arrives that federal prosecutors are able to demonstrate that what he was doing was not, actually, legal at all. Although Raymond isn't too worried at first. The story of the phone-jamming gets out in the New Hampshire press, but the state party remits him his $15,600 fee nonetheless. So the Republican Establishment must still be on his side. He's in the clear.

He has misjudged his professional company. "Ever hear the one about the president who picked a land war in the Middle East? Or the one about the vice president who took a scattergun to an old man's face? And then got the old man to apologize for getting shot? That's the type I was dealing with.... When the shit hit the fan, my political party and my former colleagues not only threw me under the bus but then blamed me for getting run over."

Here we must pause. It's in Raymond's interest in this book to paint himself as a man done wrong. Why should we trust him? That's for each individual reader to decide. I actually came away rather respecting him. Utterly contrite, deeply ashamed, he tells a story of full cooperation with federal prosecutors, his conviction, doing his time, accepting full responsibility for his acts. He doesn't make himself look all that good at all. He even tells of the time he told an RNC rep that if the feds come calling, he'll cooperate—a wink, wink, nudge, nudge signal that calls should be made to get the Justice Department to shut the investigation down. This is a self-incriminating detail. "Okay, fine, fair enough," is the response. "I hear you. I'll have a few conversations."

The investigation, however, is not shut down. It's here where the story gets fascinating—and deeply scary. When the feds do indeed come calling, his colleagues seem plainly astonished that he's willing to name the higher-ups who cooperated with him on the scheme. To them, it's simply presumed he'd take the fall and do the time in deference to higher ups in the Republican Party, Mafia-style. That, "because Tobin had become more valuable to the Republican Party than I was, I should just roll over because the Party"—the capitalization is a nice, Bolsheviki touch—was what mattered above and beyond anything and anyone.... 'What the fuck is wrong with Raymond?' was the general refrain. 'Why is he doing this to Jim Tobin? What a scumbag!'"

Out of all this, Raymond develops a fascinating circumstantial case about what this all amounts to. The RNC spent an astonishing $3 million on Tobin's legal defense. (RNC chair Ed Gillespie once made the mistake of owning up that he'd made that decision in consultation with the White House—then, wisely, said he had misspoke. "[I]mplicating the Bush/Cheney White House was a thing unbecoming to any Republcian who didn't wish to be reduced to bloody chunks for use as fertilizer at a certain Crawford, Texas ranch.")

The disloyal Raymond, on the other hand, spent $250,000 of his own money on his defense—and, he makes a pretty decent case, some of that $3 million went to spying on him. That $3 million, he suggests, was a crucially important investment for the entire conservative political enterprise. In sum: "Either Tobin knew things that the Republican elite wanted him to keep his yap shut about, or he was just the sweetest little thing they'd ever seen."

He suspects this even more so when Tobin, who had just served as New England regional chairman for the Bush reelection campaign, pleads guilty— to protect someone else, Raymond presumes. Then the executive director of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee, the guy who directly hired Raymond to carry out the phone jamming, asked to serve his prison term right away. "I want to get it over with," he told the judge. Explains Raymond: "The guy didn't even want to try for a sentence reduction; he couldn't get to jail fast enough. He was clearly taking a hit for the team, hoping the Godfathers would welcome him back into the family when he came out the other side."

So what did these men know? What were they protecting? Here's the conclusion he works his way toward: "that the New Hampshire program was only a test run, a beta version of a new campaign strategy they intended to use in other close races--and that the RNC had dispatched Tobin to find a disposable non-Bushie to try it out."

Behold the Mark of Rove. Ladies and gentleman, your Republican Party.

And so a contrite Raymond spends three months in jail—thankfully for us. He's been through the fire, and he's survived to reveal for us exactly how the Bush White House rolls: "they lie when they're in trouble, they lie when they're safe; they lie when threatened, they lie when they are threatening; they lie about lies, they lie about lying about lies. And if they should happen upon some harmless, well-meaning little truth lying around they beat it about the face and head until it looks like a lie, and wants to be a lie, and finally does become a lie. And people say there are no men of vision in Washington.... After 10 full years inside the GOP, 90 days among honest criminals wasn't any great ordeal."