Dirty Tricks Without Illusions
For Political Operative Allen Raymond, When Life Hands You Mud, Make Mud Pies

By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 18, 2008; C01

Allen Raymond is out of prison now, and out of politics, too. The former Republican campaign operative did his time in federal prison for dirty tricks in the 2002 election. Now he's sitting on the couch in the bright, airy living room of his big brick house in Bethesda, looking back over the wreckage of his political career.

"When I got into politics, I had no illusions," he says. "But I left completely disillusioned."

A decade ago, Raymond was running six states for the Republican National Committee, but his old RNC cronies abandoned him as soon as he got into trouble. "I didn't even get a phone call," he says. Now he's out of work, with no hope of ever getting a job in politics again.

"Who would hire me?" he asks. "And why would I want to work for anybody who would hire me?"

Raymond, 40, emerged from federal prison in 2006 after serving a three-month sentence, and now he has written a book about his career in politics. Titled "How to Rig an Election," it might be the most cynical American political memoir to appear since 1905, when Tammany Hall ward boss George Washington Plunkitt published a famous book revealing that his political philosophy was "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em."

Raymond also seen his opportunities and took 'em, and now he updates Plunkitt for the age of the campaign consultant: "The worst kind of client you can have is one who holds too firmly to his or her ideals. . . . Election operatives like myself and the kind of politicians who hire us have ensured that idealists can't win elections. Only the cynics are making the laws."

In the book, Raymond confesses to the crime that sent him to prison: a conspiracy to shut down the phones used by New Hampshire's Democratic Party on the day of a very close Senate election by flooding the lines with computer-generated calls. He also confesses to countless other questionable acts during his decade-long career -- acts that fall somewhere on the spectrum between the merely tawdry and the truly sleazy.

His worst deed, he says, was not the one that sent him to prison. It was arranging for white ethnic voters in New Jersey to receive recorded phone messages touting a Democratic congressional candidate in an accent Raymond describes as "angry black man." But as he tells that story, he can't help smiling, even though his candidate lost by 481 votes.

"Some people say, 'That's terrible!' " he says. "But as I said in the book, what's more terrible -- that I'm doing it, or that I'm getting the reaction that I knew I was gonna get? To me, you're hired to do a job, and the job is to win. There's a lot of money being spent and there are careers on the line and there's a lot of power on the table, and so you have an obligation to do the best job you can to get the outcome your clients want, which is to win."

Raymond didn't perform his dirty tricks because he was a passionate ideologue or even a committed Republican. He could have worked for either party: "I wasn't in it for a cause. To me it was a business. Politics is an industry. There's a lot of money there."

What Raymond loved about politics was the game, the competition, the bare-knuckle combat. "You're shooting bullets over your opponent's bow, you're trying to kill him politically," he says. "I mean, it's all nonsense -- believe me, it's all nonsense -- but there's a sense that you're living by your wits. It's not a 9-to-5 job. You're not working for IBM. And there's a sense that I eat what I kill and that's how I'm going to survive. That was the fun for me."

'The Truth Is Malleable'

Allen Raymond might fall into the category of "colorful rogue" except that he's not particularly colorful. With his bald head, pudgy face and rimless glasses, he looks like a prosperous dentist and speaks like a former preppy, which he is.

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.

"The truth is malleable," he says, sitting in his living room. "You're just crafting the message you know will win."

Raymond kept rising in the Republican ranks. In 1998, Sen. Mitch McConnell hired him to work for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. In 2000, he became deputy political director for Steve Forbes's presidential campaign.

Raymond suggested that Forbes attack his main opponent for the Republican nomination, George W. Bush, as a former drunk driver. When Forbes refused, Raymond was disgusted: "I remember thinking, you will never win, nor should you, because you don't have what it takes to go rip the guy's face off."

In 2000, Raymond founded a company called GOP Marketplace, which brokered deals between Republican political campaigns and telemarketing companies. Among Raymond's investors was Haley Barbour, his former boss at the RNC, who is now the governor of Mississippi.

Shortly before Election Day of 2002, Raymond received a call from Chuck McGee, executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party. McGee asked if GOP Marketplace could arrange for a barrage of phone calls that could tie up telephone lines set up by Democrats to arrange for rides to the polls in a closely contested Senate race. Raymond said he thought he could. He found a telemarketer who agreed to flood the Democrats' lines with automated calls for a fee of $2,500. Raymond called McGee and agreed to take the job for $15,600 -- a tidy profit of $13,100.

The scheme worked: On election morning, the Democrats' lines were barraged with automated calls that came from a company in Idaho. But McGee got cold feet, called Raymond and told him to stop the calls. Raymond did, and before noon the calls were finished. Still, the FBI investigated the case and Raymond and McGee pleaded guilty to a federal charge of conspiracy to make harassing phone calls.

They both agreed to testify against James Tobin, the RNC official who had told McGee that Raymond was the go-to guy for phone-jamming. In 2005, Tobin was convicted on two counts of telephone harassment and sentenced to 10 months in prison.

Ultimately, Raymond served three months, McGee served seven months, and Tobin's conviction was reversed by an appeals court.

Now, Raymond declines to defend or apologize for his career as a dirty trickster.

"I was a [bleep]," he says.

His wife, Elizabeth, is sitting across the living room, listening. She is asked: "Was he a [bleep]?"

"No comment," she says.

On His Own

Elizabeth Raymond is hardly the only person who does not want to comment on Allen Raymond's career in politics.

Barbour declined to comment on Raymond. So did McConnell.

McGee, Raymond's co-conspirator in the phone-jamming plot, who now runs a direct mail company in New Hampshire, also took a pass. "I appreciate your call," he said, "but I don't have any input to make."

Tobin has an unlisted number and could not be located. His attorney in the criminal case, Dane Butswinkas, did not return phone messages.

Also silent was Tom Blakely, a Republican political consultant who Raymond claims hired him to target New Jersey voters of Eastern European ethnicity with the "angry black man" calls. Blakely, president of Washington-based Jamestown Associates, declined to comment on Raymond's allegations, but he instructed an aide to relay a one-sentence message: "The notion of targeting racist Ukrainian Democrats in Princeton is totally absurd."

Ironically, one of the few people in politics who'll say anything nice about Raymond is Paul Twomey, a lawyer for the New Hampshire Democratic Party, which sued Raymond, McGee, Tobin and the RNC over the phone-jamming conspiracy and won a settlement of about $130,000.

"I actually like Raymond," Twomey says. "The stuff he did was absolutely reprehensible, but when he got caught, he took responsibility and he told the truth and I respect him for that. "

'I Paid the Price'

When Raymond went to federal prison in Loretto, Pa., in 2006, he didn't tell his sons, who were 7 and 4.

"We told them Dad has to go to India on business for three months," he says.

"We didn't want them to be afraid," his wife adds.

And prison was a pretty scary place. "I was behind the double razor wire with real criminals," he says. "I saw two guys basically carve each other up, although I didn't hang around to see how it wound up."

His prison job was tutoring inmates. One day, he found one student, a felon named Mack, too agitated to study. A piece of gym equipment had broken and couldn't be replaced because of a 1996 federal law called the No Frills Prison Act, which curtailed spending on prison recreation. Raymond was familiar with that law: He'd touted it in ads for candidates who wanted to appear tough on crime.

"Alone there in a prison classroom with a rather large, [annoyed] felon who hadn't been able to relieve any of his stress or aggravation on the weight pile that day," Raymond wrote in his book, "I realized that all the [excrement] guys like me peddle out on the campaign trail actually comes to pass if we get our candidates elected. Our promises, our phony wedge issues, our polarizing rhetoric -- it can all come true."

Since he returned from prison, Raymond says, he's spent most of his time coaching his sons' sports teams. He knows his political career is over, but he doesn't know what he'll do next. "I'm trying to figure that out," he says. "Right now, I'm a stay-at-home dad trying to get my kids to eat their breakfast."

In his book, and in person, Raymond is willing, even eager, to confess to dirty tricks and dastardly deeds. But when asked if his conscience bothers him, he's not so sure.

"I suppose later in life if I sit down and I have to reflect . . . " he says. Then he pauses, and starts again. "But, you know, I can't have all these regrets. I got my comeuppance and I paid my debt and I don't work in politics anymore. I can't even vote. . . . So I'm not gonna waste my time on regrets, because I paid the price."

His long, strange trip from politics to prison has made him a better man, he says. "Everyone needs humbling, and this was the way I needed to be humbled," he says. "I'm a much nicer guy these days."

Raymond may have changed, but he doesn't believe that his departure from politics has improved the ethical level of the trade.

"When you take a pail of water out of the ocean," he says, "does it lower the level of the ocean?"