President Bush is described as a "Connecticut-raised cowboy who'd been
blind drunk until he was forty."
Steve Forbes, whose presidential campaign Raymond worked for in 2000,
"looked like he'd been put together on an operating table" and "had a
stammering speech pattern that made you think he was on the verge of a
seizure."
Raymond, 40, also knocks the Republican Party that employed him for
nearly a decade.
"Ever hear the one about the president who picked a land war in the
Middle East?" he writes.
"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."
Tobin, meanwhile, is painted as a moderate New Englander who'd gone to
work for Bush's campaign and "reinvented himself as a full-fledged,
Bible-thumping, fear-mongering acolyte for the Holy Connecticut
Cowboy."
The U.S. attorneys who handled Tobin's trial also don't escape
derision.
Prosecutors Nick Marsh and Andrew Levchuk are described as the "pair
from Keystone" who "knew exactly nothing" when they took over the
case.
The phone-jamming scheme involved repeated hang-up calls made to jam
six phone lines - five at the Democratic Party's get-out-the-vote
operation and one for a firefighters union offering rides to the
polls.
Raymond writes that the plan was to tie up the lines all day, but it
was aborted after 90 minutes on orders from then-state Republican
Party Chairman John Dowd, who insisted it was illegal.
The calls were made on the day of the down-to-the-wire Senate race
between Jeanne Shaheen and John Sununu, whose names are almost
afterthoughts in the book, mentioned only after pages of discussing
the scheme.
Sununu won the election by 19,571 votes; the two may face a rematch
next year.
Raymond, who served three months in federal prison, and two other men
pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy charges for their roles in the
scheme.
Chuck McGee, executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party
at the time, came up with the idea.
Idaho telemarketer Shaun Hansen owned the company that made the calls.
As the phone-jamming blew up in the press and the FBI investigated,
Allen wrote, the RNC opted for "the old-school cover-up" route.
Tobin pleaded not guilty, went to trial and was convicted of telephone
harassment in 2005.
This spring, an appeals court overturned the ruling and sent the case
back to U.S. District Court in Concord for further arguments.
Tobin is slated for a new trial in February, though Judge Steven
McAuliffe is considering a motion to acquit him.
To Raymond, Tobin was the scheme's "linchpin," and he wrote that he
"couldn't believe it" when he read in the newspaper that Tobin pleaded
not guilty.
"Now, Tobin was not mentally defective; he could not have believed his
own lies," Raymond wrote.
To Raymond, he said, the key question is: "Who is he protecting?"
Raymond repeatedly notes that the RNC has paid millions for Tobin's
legal defense.
"My old pals at the Republican National Committee were spending almost
$3 million on my coconspirator's legal defense because he was still a
loyal member of the GOP family, while at the same time labeling me a
liar, a rogue and a thief to any news outlet that would listen," he
wrote.
The smaller details of being a man under indictment are also detailed
in the book.
Raymond went to great pains to convince lawyers at the Department of
Justice that he wasn't what they were expecting - "a slimy D.C.
scoundrel in a Gucci suit, French cuffs, tassel shoes and a fat
watch."
When he was under investigation, he owned three watches worth a total
of $6,000 - so he went to CVS and bought a Timex.
He also pulled out the first suit he'd owned, "a power tie from 1990"
and loafers with a whole.
"When I put the whole ensemble together, (my wife) Elizabeth just
clucked her tongue and gave me the thumbs-up," he wrote.
"And then I jumped into my Audi and went to my meeting."
In addition to phone jamming, Raymond elaborates on other political
dirty tricks, such as using racial tensions to target phone calls in a
New Jersey congressional race that sounded as if they were coming in
support of his opponent.
He deployed the "angry black man" voice on Eastern European Democrats
and used actors with "thick Spanish accents" to tape calls aimed at
union households.
These days, Raymond said, he's promoting his book, coaching little
league and working at a few business ventures on the side.
He lives in the Washington, D.C., area with his wife and two
elementary-school-age sons.
He's done with working in politics.
As a felon, he said, he's not allowed to vote.
But if he could, he'd call himself undeclared, no longer a Republican.
From The Concord Monitor, 12/19/07:
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071219/FRONTPAGE/712190383
Book links jamming to GOP 'high ups'
Operative imprisoned in case tells his story
By LAUREN R. DORGAN
Monitor staff
The conspiracy to jam New Hampshire Democratic Party phone lines on
Election Day 2002 must have gone to the top of the Republican Party,
one of the operatives imprisoned in the scheme writes in a forthcoming
book.
Republican consultant Allen Raymond writes that he became involved
only because he'd been called by James Tobin, then the New England
political director for the Republican National Committee.
"The Bush White House had complete control of 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 high-ups," Raymond wrote in How
To Rig an Election, a book set for publication next month.
"That's if Tobin, rather than one of his bosses, had even thought of
the ploy himself - which seemed unlikely."
Raymond, who once had the same RNC job as Tobin for the mid-Atlantic
region, said that before Tobin's call, his telemarketing outfit, GOP
Marketplace, had been shut out of RNC jobs.
Allen figured he'd lost favor because he publicly aired his disdain
for Bush and feuded with a Bush vendor.
"I figured this was the Dare - the Bushies' way of making me prove my
stripes to get back into the club," he wrote.
In an interview, Raymond said the book had two aims:
To entertain - he said he aimed for a cross between Ball Four and Wise
Guys (the book Goodfellas was based on) - and to follow the adage
"sunlight's the best disinfectant."
"Anybody who reads this book and is mad at me has no sense of humor,"
he said.
The Monitor obtained an advance copy yesterday.
The book is set for release Jan. 8, the day of New Hampshire's
presidential primary.
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Harry
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