hold the phone

In less turbulent times, this might well have been a front-page scandal. But honestly, how can a little New Hampshire phone jamming compare with a concerted White House effort to discredit a critic (read today’s New York Times)? With a growing list of misdeeds in the halls of Congress? With the most powerful lobbyist indicted?

What is getting harder and harder for Right Wing pundits to pull off is an effort to compartmentalize all of these scandals. Even without an independent press to investigate, there is growing recognition that all of these scandals, all this corruption, links back to a centralized source.

Never mind the efforts to pounce on Democrats. The Right Wing all but bannered headlines of “Cynthia McKinney Attacks D.C. Cop with Razr!” These days, the sounds of the echo chamber fall on deaf ears.

You may remember the New Hampshire case. Republican operatives coordinated an effort to jam the phone lines at Democratic headquarters on Election Day 2002, hoping to shut down Get Out The Vote efforts and handcuff the opposition.

A flood of hang-up calls tied the Democrats phone bank in knots on Election Day. The key race saw Republican John Sununu defeat Democrat Jean Shaheen by a 51-46 margin.

Court records now show that key figures in this scheme were in regular contact with The White House and national Republican Party headquarters in the three-day period around Election Day.

James Tobin, a Bush campaign operative, recently was convicted in the case. His phone records show two dozen calls to The White House during the time the plan to jam the Democrats phone bank were finalized, carried out and, suddenly, shut down.

According to the Associated Press story:

“The national Republican Party, which paid millions in legal bills to defend Tobin, says the contacts involved routine election business and that it was ‘preposterous’ to suggest the calls involved phone jamming.”

It should be noted that virtually all these calls were to the White House political affairs office – an office headed in 2002 by current RNC chairman Ken Mehlman.

I will grant you that, in the course of running an election, phone calls from ranking political operatives on the ground in the many states to party headquarters is not out of the ordinary. Then again, a major operation like this one does not hatch itself without notice.

The bigger story, and one that should be noted by one and all, is the overall Republican election strategy: block the vote.

Key to George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign was a plan to thrown voters off the election rolls and prevent them from going to the polls in Florida. When it looked as if that might now work, they sent armies of white-shirted lawyers to both the Sunshine State and the Supreme Court to block the recount.

Ohio in 2004 was awash in efforts to prevent voters from getting to the polls – spearheaded by a state Secretary of State who doubled as the state campaign chair for Bush (sound familiar?). Predominantly minority voting districts, traditionally Democratic strongholds, were forced to far fewer voting machines than are mandated by state law – which turned into huge lines of voters unable to get to the polls. And while those lines of voters waited patiently to cast their ballots, Republican lawyers rushed into courtrooms around the state to find a judge willing to close the polls.

This nation was built on the idea of One Person, One Vote. The Bush (mis)Administration and the fraying Republican majority in Congress is built on the idea of One Republican, One Vote (and screw as many Democrats as possible).

More soon.