Raymond’s dirty tricks

Allen Raymond was once one of the Republican Party’s most prolific dirty tricksters, says Peter Carlson in The Washington Post. Then he got caught. In 2006, the political operative spent three months in prison for flooding Democratic Party phone lines in New Hampshire with computer-generated calls during the 2002 elections. That stunt, designed to cripple Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts, ended a career on the seamier side of American politics. Now Raymond is spilling his guts in a political memoir, How to Rig an Election, in which he confesses to a number of other sleazy acts. He says he once arranged for white ethnic voters to receive recorded messages touting a Democratic congressional candidate in an accent Raymond describes as “angry black man.” He defeated two state assembly candidates by linking them to rotten real estate deals that, he says, “had nothing whatsoever to do with either of them.” To defeat Democratic Rep. Herb Klein in 1994, he leaked to reporters a sealed court document linking Klein to a hit-and-run incident years earlier. Raymond says his time in prison made him realize just how low he had sunk. “Everyone needs humbling, and this was the way I needed to be humbled. I’m a much nicer guy these days.” He has no intention of returning to politics. “Who would hire me?” he asks. “And why would I want to work for anybody who would?”

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