Morality vs. Politics and My Job as a GOP Operative

By Allen Raymond
from TPM cafe

My favorite blog comment about How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative was “Well, that’s refreshing candor from a guy who’s probably going to hell.” It is a favorite because it assumes so much so wrongly.

Setting aside any debate over such a thing as hell, I was never hired by a campaign to be the moral compass. In fact, morality is a slippery slope and not a political dialogue I would willingly enter or incite. I was hired to engineer victory. With so much at stake, morality was not a luxury to be afforded candidates or their staff.

Campaign managers and consultants, in both U.S. political parties, are hired to win. Period. They are not hired to ease the political conscience – if anything they are hired to render it powerless (or at least frustrate it to the point of it giving up and going away). That was the dynamic I bought into when I became a Republican campaign manager and consultant; party v. party; Republicans v. Democrats; winning v. losing.

However, I never bought into the dynamic of Allen Raymond v. the United States government. So when that became my reality, the choice was easy. I never hesitated to tell the truth the moment our government knocked on my door and asked me what happened on Election Day 2002.

(Continued here.)