HOW REPUBLICANS WIN ELECTIONS

Republicans are obsessed that unionized workers or colored people or college students are going to vote twice. Or worse yet, that twenty million Mexicans are going to sneak over the border and vote on the first Tuesday in November... any November. They are hysterical about it. And the same folks who have convinced them that Christmas and Easter and their guns are under siege have brainwashed them into thinking the damn libruls are stealing the elections. In their minds that makes it ok to... steal the elections.

Allen Raymond has a book out, How to Rig An Election, Confessions of a Republican Operative, and he ought to know. He spent some time in prison for doing just that. Author Raymond was one of several Republicans who took the fall for the GOP theft of the 2002 New Hampshire senate election-- which threw Bush control of the Senate-- and gave right-winger John Sununu an undeserved victory. Today AlterNet published an interview with Raymond-- who was angry because Mehlman and the RNC asked his firm to jam Democratic phone lines, but would not defend him in court after Democrats fought back and pressed court charges. Raymond went to jail. Mehlman, Rove and Sununu still haven't.

ALTERNET: The title of your book is How to Rig an Election. Can elections be rigged?

RAYMOND:: Sure. We're not talking about what people often think about, like ballot box stuffing. Certainly, that stuff goes on here and there. What we are really talking about in the book is how messages are created and delivered to the voting public, in a way that orchestrates and manipulates response. It's all about feeling an emotion; it's not about raw issues and logic.

In the book I give a lot of examples of rigging elections by, put it this way, guys like me-- I used to be a campaign manager. Once you are all said and done and deliver a message, two plus two equals whatever I want it to equal. The facts and sometimes even contorting the facts to lead voters to conclusions that may not necessarily, if you step back, make any sense-- but, in context, make all the sense in the world.

There's that aspect of it. Then there's just the more raw aspect of it, which leads up to the culmination of the book, which is the 2002 New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal.

Raymond thinks Republicans are about to pick McCain because it's "his turn. That's in the Republican DNA. You pick the guy whose turn it is. I think that's more of the dynamic going on." Alternet asked him what tactics he expects to see in the primary and the general out of the GOP. "In both, you see tactics that seek to tap into latent bigotry and racism. That's just part of the equation. And it's a horrible thing to say. But it's better to be candid and transparent to understand what is going on than ignore the elephant in the room. For instance, let's go back to 2000 and the South Carolina attack on Sen. McCain and his daughter, which was totally abhorrent, but that was meant to tap into a racist thread or strain in a segment in that electorate. It's going on again in South Carolina, this time targeted at Gov. Romney and his faith and tying that to polygamy. So that's bigotry."

Back to the GOP strategy of election theft, Alternet, of course, wanted to know how high up the chain of command it went. "Is everything tied to Karl Rove?" they asked.

RAYMOND: There is a difference between the line responsibility and the overall responsibility. So, a Karl Rove is going to be responsible for the overall strategic and tactical thinking. But when you get down in the trenches, there's line responsibility. And so most decisions don't go any higher than, say, the political director at the Republican National Committee.

But in my case, having worked there in those jobs, I knew two things, which was-- the first being, and I say that in the book, this (phone-jamming) was an unusual request. It prompted me to seek out an attorney. But what that tells me is such things don't see the light of day unless they have been vetted, particularly by someone who has worked at the RNC for as long as my co-conspirator had.

The GOP primary in South Carolina is a perfect way to observe American politics at it's very worst-- the way it was shaped by scumbags and soul-dead criminals like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove.

In the last week before its Jan. 19 primary, the Palmetto State is awash in stealth e-mail attacks, fake polling calls and other dirty tricks reminiscent of the scurrilous rumors that scuttled John McCain's candidacy in 2000.

The dubious tradition stretches back to native son Lee Atwater, the Republican operative who invented many of the modern techniques of negative campaigning, including the 1988 ad that linked Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis to the parole of murderer Willie Horton and contributed to the victory of President George H.W. Bush that year.

"Many understudies of Lee Atwater are still in this state, in the political-consulting business,'' said Blease Graham, a scholar of Southern politics at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.
Among Republicans, the shenanigans this year include automated telephone pseudo-surveys trashing former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson's stance on abortion, mailings claiming Arizona Senator McCain turned his back on fellow prisoners of war in Vietnam and a phony Christmas card from former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney extolling polygamy.

...Some practitioners of the dark political arts defend these tactics. In 2004, Warren Tompkins, a veteran South Carolina political strategist who worked the Bush campaign in 2000, was asked why operatives spread false rumors about McCain in that race. ``It worked, didn't it?'' said Tompkins, who now works for Romney.