How to rig an election
We don’t normally talk about books that much, but I just read one during a long flight that was truly fascinating — How To Rig an Election by Allen Raymond, one of the Republican operatives who went to jail in the phone jamming scandal in New Hampshire. The book is quite instructive in terms of what it shows about the northeastern Republican mind: Raymond is not particularly conservative, but employs an endless array of nasty tricks, from direct mail pieces so vile his own candidate begs him not run them, to robocalls to white voters using the voice of an “angry black man” urging them to vote for the other candidate, to placing so many calls to a Democratic phone bank that it makes it impossible for volunteers to call out (this is illegal and it’s what he ends up going to jail for). Much of it is eerily similar to things we’ve seen locally — the direct mail pieces and messing with phone banks of course stand out.
What’s perhaps most interesting about the author is his hatred of more right-wing Republicans. He professes to be moderate politically and has nary a bad word to say politically about the Democrats he ran against. But he describes hard-core New Jersey Republican primary voters (and all southern Republicans) as “knuckle-draggers”, the “Jesus loves guns crowd”, and “troglodytes”. I wonder sometimes if the Bill Smiths and Steve Minariks of the world feel the same way about the D&C blog crowd.
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