Maine GOP’s hired gun’ tells it as it was

When Rhode Island native Alex Ray arrived in Maine in 1971 as the Republican State Committee’s first executive director, what he found was not a Republican Party “but three disparate groups masquerading as a political organization. Neither really spoke to or respected the other,” Ray writes in his new book, “Hired Gun: A Political Odyssey.”

There was the state committee, for whom Ray worked, the elected Republican legislators “who collectively viewed the state committee as a useless social group,” and “the Margaret Chase Smith Party – those whose only interest was in keeping the legendary senator in office.”

President Nixon recently had signed into law a bill giving 18-year-olds the right to vote. While Maine Republicans were trying to prevent that from happening here, Maine Democrats were pursuing the young voters. “I felt like I had stepped back into the 1940s,” Ray recalls.

Any success he would have in his new job would come only from bringing the factions together. So Ray went to Washington to meet with Sen. Smith, who received him graciously and offered to do her part in the interest of party cohesiveness.

But Sen. Smith’s chief of staff, retired Gen. Bill Lewis – the real power in the office, Ray had been told by some Republicans – had other ideas about cooperation. How Lewis stiffed the new party director, and how Ray retaliated, is one of the more amusing anecdotes in the book, which is available at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Target and other bookstores.

Ray, introduced to Rhode Island’s bare-knuckle politics at an early age, acknowledges that he may have been somewhat abrasive when he arrived in Maine as the GOP’s hired gun. Not every Republican took to him, and some of the party’s heavier hitters openly lobbied the Republican State Committee to can him before he could complete his grand vision of party unity. Because Ray had friends in the right places who appreciated his work to deliver Republican majorities in the Maine House and Senate, the attempted coup was unsuccessful.

In January 1974, Ray resigned as the party’s executive director to work in the gubernatorial primary campaign of Jim Erwin. After he won the primary, Erwin succumbed to pressure from the losing candidates to fire Ray before the general election. The hard-nosed political consultant signed on to manage a political campaign in Vermont.

As the years rolled on, he developed a political consultation business that would see him involved with campaigns on the state and national level on the Eastern Seaboard, and his resume included work for the Republican National Committee as a regional political director.

His Maryland firm, Chesapeake Media, had clients nationwide when he and his wife, Anne, moved to Chelsea in Kennebec County – a dream of Ray’s from the day he set foot on Maine soil more than 35 years ago. Now in semiretirement mode, he hopes to become involved in Maine’s 2010 Republican gubernatorial campaign.

His book, loaded with anecdotes about famous and infamous politicians Ray has had for clients or has dealt with in other ways, is a treat for political junkies. As a primer for would-be political consultants, it contains its fair share of advice, from how to put a client’s best foot forward to how to keep it out of his mouth long enough to get him elected. Political science graduates who pick up the book will soon sense that a real political campaign has little or no relevance to what they may have been taught in the college classroom.

Political consulting is pretty much a no-win deal for the practitioner. Run a successful campaign and the candidate often takes the credit. Lose, and all the credit suddenly belongs to you.

“We bring organization, strategy and communications skills to a campaign,” Ray said in an e-mail interview Tuesday. “While we can showcase a client in a favorable light, we can’t give brains and personality. We reflect the good qualities of a candidate, and often deflect the shortcomings.”

In other words, you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. But you sure can have a lot of fun trying.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.