The wiseguy: a repellent street-level GQP operative's surprisingly entertaining memoir.

AuthorGreen, Joshua
PositionHow to Rig on Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative - Book review

How to Rig on Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative

By Allen Raymond

Simon and Schuster, 256 pp.

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Pick up a Washington memoir in the hope of gleaning hidden truths, or even just a feel for the texture of life in the capital s inner sanctums, and you're likely to come away disappointed. Washington memoirs may not be any more opaque, gilded, and self-serving than other kinds, but they sure feel that way. That's because most are written not for the reader, but for the writer. If you're a big enough deal that you're committing your thoughts to paper, chances are you're thinking mainly about your own career advancement, and as the recent memoirs of the presidential aspirants made plain, this rarely yields much beyond bland self-promotion. Readers willing to lower their sights a bit discover small rewards. Staffers' memoirs are more likely to traffic in score settling and limited truth telling--Nancy's astrology fixation, Hillary's communion with Eleanor Roosevelt's ghost. But even here unearthing the diamonds requires a pickax and a strong back, because for aides, too, the premium for publishing is really no different: If you aim to get ahead--and who in Washington doesn't?--you'd better be careful who you cross. So these tend to be mountains of banality as well. One reason the index is the part of the book Washingtonians flip to first is that if you know who's going to get the knife it's easier to skip right to it.

Such shortcuts are entirely unnecessary with How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, because it's clear from the book jacket that the author, Allen Raymond, won't be getting ahead, and, owing to the circumstances of why this is so, has a knife out for just about everybody. Raymond is the veteran GOP operative who used his phone-banking business to jam Democratic phone lines in New Hampshire on election day 2002 in order to upset the party's voter-turnout operation. Republicans swept the midterms, including the big Senate race in New Hampshire, but things didn't turn out nearly so well for Raymond. He was busted by the feds, abandoned by his own party, and wound up serving time in prison, the stooge in a scandal that clearly reached much higher. How to Rig an Election is Raymond's revenge on the party that screwed him--an angry, unsparing, and occasionally funny look at the seamy underside of politics by a man who seems to have embodied all its worst qualities.

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