Dirty Tricks Without Illusions

He comes from what he calls "a rather illustrious old American family." His great-grandfather founded the Underwood Typewriter Co. and, according to family lore, the founder's wife once scolded an electrician for hanging a light over the wrong painting: "No, no," she said, "the other Monet."

Raymond grew up in an affluent suburb in Marin County, Calif., before moving with his divorced mother to Paris. He got kicked out of a Massachusetts prep school for smoking pot, but in 1989 he graduated from Hobart College, an English major who played rugby and chewed tobacco.

After college, he spent a couple of years at a public relations firm in New York, where his chief triumph consisted of using statistics on toilet-flushing during halftime of the Super Bowl to gain a mention of his client, Ty-D-Bol, on the telecast of the big game.

Figuring that politics might be even more interesting than Ty-D-Bol, he quit his job and enrolled in Baruch College's graduate program in political management. He graduated in 1992, eager to work on a political campaign. When a classmate informed him that the big money was going to the Republicans, Raymond decided that he was a Republican.

His first job was handling three counties in New Jersey for the Bush-Quayle reelection campaign in 1992. His candidates lost, but Election Day was brightened for Raymond when his bosses gave him $15,000 in cash to hand out to volunteers. He handed out $13,000, he writes, but kept "a $2,000 bonus" for himself, thus proving that he possessed the instincts of a real political pro.

In 1993, Raymond managed the reelection campaigns of two New Jersey Republican assemblymen. He won both races in the traditional manner -- by slinging mud at the Democratic opponents. He sent out a mass mailing that linked both Democrats, he writes, to "rotten real estate deals in Camden County that had nothing whatsoever to do with either of them."

When one of his own candidates ordered him to stop the scurrilous mailings, Raymond promised that he would -- but he never did. "I figured, he's running, he's made the decision to get back into office and it's my job to get him there, even if it's kicking and screaming," he explains. "Do you twist reality to fit your needs? You do. And you can't spend a lot of time regretting that you're doing it."

In 1994, Raymond managed the congressional campaign of New Jersey Republican William Martini, who was running against Democratic incumbent Herb Klein. As Raymond tells the story in his book, he won that election by giving reporters a court-sealed legal document describing how Klein had allegedly run over a pedestrian outside a social club seven years earlier. Then he produced T-shirts denouncing Klein as "Hit and Run Herb."

Martini, now a federal judge, tells a slightly different story. He remembers possessing his opponent's driving record but he doesn't remember Raymond leaking it to the press. "I can't recall that," he said. "When he worked for me, I don't know of anything he did that was underhanded, and I wouldn't have tolerated it."

Either way, Martini won the election, went to Congress and in 1995 hired Raymond as his chief of staff. Those were heady days for Republicans: Led by Newt Gingrich, they'd taken control of Congress and were promising to enact radical reforms. But Raymond had little interest in policy issues and he hated working in Congress. Nor was he fond of the Southern social conservatives who made up much of the Gingrich army. In his book, he calls them "backwoods hayseeds" and "assault rifle knuckle-draggers."

His scorn for his fellow Republicans did not stop him from accepting a job as an RNC regional political director, responsible for the mid-Atlantic states. In that job, Raymond writes, he continued his mudslinging. Among the victims was Charlotte Pritt, a Democrat running for governor of West Virginia in 1996. In the state legislature, Pritt had supported a bill to teach sex education in middle schools. Raymond turned those "innocent facts," he writes, into a 30-second ad that screamed: "Charlotte Pritt proposed teaching first-graders about condoms!"

The lie worked: Pritt lost to Raymond's candidate.