Allen Raymond is a highly entertaining guy. Completely unethical, but highly entertaining.
How to Rig Win an Election is the story of Raymond's rise and fall in Republican politics as a campaign consultant. It details his education, introduction to local politics in New Jersey, and the questionable actions that landed him in prison. Nothing he revealed was particularly surprising -- we've all seen what a circus American elections can be, but we can only guess at what happens behind the scenes. So this was an interesting peek into the mind of a PR guru.
I've always wondered how people in political PR can straddle that gray line between right and wrong and still sleep at night, how they justify the things they do, how they can be proud of their ability to twist information to make good politicians look bad and clean ones look dirty.
Turns out, for Raymond at least, it's all about being victorious election day.
Oh, and the money.
Had the southern "Republican Revolution" not been rolling across the country, Raymond could've easily ended up working as a Democratic consultant. But the Republican side of the aisle was where the money was, so that's where Raymond went.
He started working local elections in New Jersey, which were interesting to read about, but when he described his experiences working on the Steve Forbes campaign (against George W. Bush), he really got my attention.
Raymond and his team thought Forbes was too nice to win -- and they were right. Karl Rove and the rest of the Bush machine used a brilliant strategy, convincing Forbes not to go negative, to abstain from negative attacks.
And he fell for it. Forbes wouldn't fight back. His team would come up with responses to the lies and misleading information -- responses that were both true and catchy -- but Forbes wouldn't use them. He thought they were too harsh, too personal, too negative.
Raymond's time with the Forbes campaign didn't involve any of the shady dealings that would later land him in prison, but to me it was the most insightful part of the book. Whereas I respect Forbes more for knowing these things about him, Raymond saw him as a guy who didn't deserve the presidency because he didn't "have the gumption or the guts ... [didn't] have what it takes to go rip the [other] guy's face off."
Because of his humor, I felt more sympathetic to Raymond than I thought I would. It's a testament to his PR talents that I finished the book despising what he was part of, but not necessarily him as a person.
There are some truly great lines in the book, and in the Epilogue Raymond makes some sickeningly true assessments about former President Bush the Younger and the state of our democracy. But the most true of all was this about voters:
"[Politicians] get in power, they stay in power, and they keep the power. But don't the voters have some power in this mess? Sure. And they give it up every election."