The trial of Jim Tobin is playing out in federal court in Concord. At issue is Tobin’s alleged role in orchestrating hundreds of computer-generated hang-up calls that paralyzed Democratic get-out-the-vote phone calls on Election Day in 2002. That year, in a closely watched U.S. Senate race, Republican incumbent John Sununu defeated Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, 51-46 percent.
Regardless of the jury’s decision, the implications run deep for Republican Party politics. The Republican National Committee has already spent over $700,000 on Tobin’s defense.

The trial of Jim Tobin is playing out in federal court in Concord. At issue is Tobin’s alleged role in orchestrating hundreds of computer-generated hang-up calls that paralyzed Democratic get-out-the-vote phone calls on Election Day in 2002. That year, in a closely watched U.S. Senate race, Republican incumbent John Sununu defeated Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, 51-46 percent.
Regardless of the jury’s decision, the implications run deep for Republican Party politics. The Republican National Committee has already spent over $700,000 on Tobin’s defense.

Tobin, who later went on to head up George Bush’s New England regional campaign in 2004, was GOP political director for New England in 2002 and part of a national Republican Party effort to elect Republican senators. Chuck McGee, the former executive director of the N.H. Republican State Committee, recently completed a jail sentence for charges connected to the Election Day scandal. He and convicted co-conspirator Allen Raymond—the former head of two right-wing issue groups and of G.O.P. Marketplace, which brokered political telemarketing campaigns—have been cooperating with authorities. Ongoing investigations now point to the involvement of none other than that legendary right wing power trio: Tom Delay, Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist.

Surprisingly, no state is in a better position to expose the full extent of GOP corruption than New Hampshire. This is where the bad guys got caught red-handed tampering with an election.
Still, how can this be compared to Watergate? The Watergate scandal brought down the president of the United States, but left the then-fledgling right wing movement intact. This investigation will do just the opposite. George Bush will likely weather the storm as a very lame duck, but the ideological underpinnings of the right wing movement are crumbling.

The story actually begins three decades ago, with another investigation. In the early 1970s, congressional investigators connected the dots from a seemingly random, botched hotel break-in to the Oval Office. The earth shook. When the dust settled, Richard Nixon—who had established his ideological credentials by aiding Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts in the early 1950s—was gone, and the conservative movement temporarily lost its claim to the moral high ground.

Undaunted, the movement moved further to the right and continued to grow. Heavily funded by industrialist donors, it devoted the next 30 years to promoting an increasingly extremist agenda through an elaborate web of think tanks, anti-tax groups, political action committees, patriotic jingo-ism, fundamentalist religious networks and media empires that now dominate our political lives.
The underlying idea was to weaken government and strengthen capital interests over wage earners. The whole package was wrapped in ideals like freedom, responsibility and, ultimately, George W. Bush’s “ownership society.”

Along the way, huge amounts of money bought huge amounts of influence. By 2002, super-lobbyists such as Jack Abramoff, who calls former House Speaker Tom Delay one of his “closest and dearest personal friends,” had more power than most members of Congress. At that time, elected Republican leaders such as Delay were opening their offices to the guy with the biggest check instead of the guy with the biggest ideas. Many of the checks were made out to Delay’s own political action committee, known as Americans for a Republican Majority (ARMPAC).

Meanwhile, another of Abramoff’s long-time dear friends, Grover Norquist, was spreading the right-wing strategy throughout the U.S. Congress, the White House, and every statehouse in the nation. Norquist’s favorite weapon was the phony-baloney anti-tax pledge. The anti-tax pledge sounds good, but it is nothing but a smokescreen for every power-grabbing scheme imaginable. Norquist’s organization, Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), is in truth funded by 80 corporations for their own benefit. Norquist worked with our current president Bush (yes—Dubbya is a pledge signer too) to save the corporate world billions of dollars in taxes. To show their eternal appreciation, these same corporations have been kind enough to re-invest a small percentage of their tax savings back into the right wing coffers.
These fellows engineered a self-perpetuating money machine. (Some of them also manufacture vote counting hardware and software—but we’ll save that one for another day.)

Unfortunately, millions of Americans bought the whole package. We elected more and more so called anti-taxers, including N.H. Gov. Craig Benson (another Norquist signer) because middle class wage earners hoped their lives would get better. The results have been just the opposite—in 2005 the little guy has far less protection from financial tyranny than he had in 1999.

Thank God, the smokescreens are finally clearing. Delay and Abramoff have been indicted and Norquist is under investigation. All three are implicated in a scheme that laundered casino gambling money from Gulf Coast Indian tribes represented by Abramoff. Delay is accused of using the Republican National Committee to launder some of this money. The washed-money was then diverted to State Republican Committees to influence elections.

Some of this ill-gotten money found its way to the N.H. State Republican Committee just days prior to the phone jamming incident.

Federal investigators are now following the money to more crooks, and the Tobin trial is likely to fill in a few more pieces of the puzzle. Sworn testimony, stiff prisons sentences and plea bargains have a way of freeing up the truth.

Already, the Chuck McGee trial established the following facts: In November 2002, the N.H. State Republican Committee paid $15,600 to G.O.P. Marketplace to jam the Democratic Party phones. G.O.P. Marketplace in turn sub-contracted an Idaho company called Mylo Enterprises. On Election Day, Mylo Enterprises did what they were hired to do—their computers aimed relentless and meaningless calls at the Manchester phone bank.

The McGee trial did not, however, answer the question of the day—where did the $15,600 come from?
One possibility is particularly intriguing: the public has recently learned that in 2002 the New Hampshire Republican State Committee received $5,000 from the Mississippi Band of Choctow Indians on Oct. 28 and another $5,000 from the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians on the same date. This ties both Abramoff and Norquist to the investigation, because the tribes were clients of Abramoff. Under pressure, Norquist has admitted that a good deal of Indian casino money also went through his organization, ATR. Not only that, Norquist also has admitted skimming as much as $25,000 per transaction. A third suspicious $5,000 payment was made by Tom Delay’s aforementioned ARMPAC on Nov. 1, 2002. All of this is now under Federal Election Commission investigation.

The possibilities are endless.

If the New Hampshire press and the public follow this story and demand answers, the whole thing should unravel before the 2006 mid-term elections. And if we hold the whole gang accountable, the earth could shake again.

Chaz Proulx is the Communication Director for Democracy For New Hampshire and a founding member of the Seacoast Progressive Alliance. A resident of Exeter, he grew up in Raymond, where his parents still live.