On December 6, 2005, Charles McGee looked tired and miserable. Slumped in the witness stand of NH Federal District Court, he answered questions about his relationship with defendant James Tobin. Real reporters reported his testimony;* now here’s what I think is the story-behind-the-story.
Chuck McGee, exhausted, unhappy, disillusioned, and fresh out of Federal Prison, is a victim in the NH phone-jamming scandal. He is a victim of the culture wars, where both left- and right-wingers have re-defined politics as a kind of war against an opposition that’s just-plain evil. And he is a victim of James Tobin.
In 2002, young Charles McGee was an enthusiastic political go-getter–one whose paying job (Executive Director for the NH Republican Party) mirrored his very strongly-held beliefs. One of those beliefs was that Democrats were “the enemy.” Then McGee had an idea that seemed to him wonderfully clever–why not disrupt “enemy communication” on election day 2002?
McGee took his brainchild to several telemarketers–every one of them gave it the cold shoulder it deserved. Then came what McGee must have seen as a great opportunity. James Tobin, a very big national RNC bigshot, came to town, and Chuck McGee sold him his scheme: they would hire telemarketers to tie up Democrats’ phones on election day, creating chaos and blocking their get-out-the-vote effort.
Tobin’s response should have been, “You must be kidding.” Or maybe, “Our party supports honest elections.” Or even, more cynically but showing some care for the future of his much younger colleague, “Do you realize how much trouble you could get into?”
James Tobin’s response was none of the above. James Tobin liked McGee’s idea so much that he gave McGee the phone number of a Republican telemarketing bigshot named Allen Raymond. Tobin liked McGee’s idea so much that he went a step further, pre-calling Raymond to say that McGee would be in touch.
Wow! Chuck McGee must have seen himself as a young Republican taking that first step up the big career ladder. Instead, Chuck McGee had just volunteered to play fall-guy if this un-American scheme was ever discovered.
Now Chuck McGee is back from seven months in federal prison. The two much-older mentors who turned his wild idea into real-life crime have yet to spend a single day in prison. But chances are that Chuck McGee will spend the rest of his life paying for his belief in the
“politics is war” meme that has been so profitable for his party’s generals.
* More on this story in the Concord Monitor, Maine Press Herald, Bangor News , and Beverley Wang’s AP story. (Or, use Google News to roll your own news search.)