The conspiracy to jam New Hampshire Democratic Party phone lines on Election Day 2002 must have gone to the top of the Republican Party, one of the operatives imprisoned in the scheme writes in a forthcoming book.

Republican consultant Allen Raymond writes that he became involved only because he'd been called by James Tobin, then the New England political director for the Republican National Committee.

"The Bush White House had complete control of the RNC, and there was no way someone like Tobin was going to try what he was proposing without first getting it vetted by his high-ups," Raymond wrote in How To Rig an Election, a book set for publication next month. "That's if Tobin, rather than one of his bosses, had even thought of the ploy himself - which seemed unlikely."

Raymond, who once had the same RNC job as Tobin for the mid-Atlantic region, said that before Tobin's call, his telemarketing outfit, GOP Marketplace, had been shut out of RNC jobs. Allen figured he'd lost favor because he publicly aired his disdain for Bush and feuded with a Bush vendor. "I figured this was the Dare - the Bushies' way of making me prove my stripes to get back into the club," he wrote.

In an interview, Raymond said the book had two aims: To entertain - he said he aimed for a cross between Ball Four and Wise Guys (the book Goodfellas was based on) - and to follow the adage "sunlight's the best disinfectant."

"Anybody who reads this book and is mad at me has no sense of humor," he said.

The Monitor obtained an advance copy yesterday. The book is set for release Jan. 8, the day of New Hampshire's presidential primary.

Former gossip columnist Ian Spiegelman, who used to write the New York Post's Page Six, co-wrote the book, which is full of vulgar, colorful language. Raymond said he was connected with Spiegelman through his agent.

"The gossip world at the level he was working is highly charged, highly political," Raymond said. "So I knew that he'd understand what I was talking about."

President Bush is described as a "Connecticut-raised cowboy who'd been blind drunk until he was forty." Steve Forbes, whose presidential campaign Raymond worked for in 2000, "looked like he'd been put together on an operating table" and "had a stammering speech pattern that made you think he was on the verge of a seizure."

Raymond, 40, also knocks the Republican Party that employed him for nearly a decade. "Ever hear the one about the president who picked a land war in the Middle East?" he writes. "Or the one about the vice president who took a scattergun to an old man's face? And then got the old man to apologize for getting shot? That's the type I was dealing with."

Tobin, meanwhile, is painted as a moderate New Englander who'd gone to work for Bush's campaign and "reinvented himself as a full-fledged, Bible-thumping, fear-mongering acolyte for the Holy Connecticut Cowboy."

The U.S. attorneys who handled Tobin's trial also don't escape derision. Prosecutors Nick Marsh and Andrew Levchuk are described as the "pair from Keystone" who "knew exactly nothing" when they took over the case.

The phone-jamming scheme involved repeated hang-up calls made to jam six phone lines - five at the Democratic Party's get-out-the-vote operation and one for a firefighters union offering rides to the polls. Raymond writes that the plan was to tie up the lines all day, but it was aborted after 90 minutes on orders from then-state Republican Party Chairman John Dowd, who insisted it was illegal.

The calls were made on the day of the down-to-the-wire Senate race between Jeanne Shaheen and John Sununu, whose names are almost afterthoughts in the book, mentioned only after pages of discussing the scheme. Sununu won the election by 19,571 votes; the two may face a rematch next year.

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