The word "change" quickly became a jaw-grindingly overused term on the presidential campaign trail in the last week, but Tuesday's debut of a colorful new book chronicling the ongoing chicanery in politics reminds us why so many Iowans were eager for it.

In his hilarious-yet-disgusting political memoir How to Rig An Election, former GOP operative Allen Raymond and ghostwriter Ian Spiegelman lay bare his role in the Republicans' 2002 Election Day scheme to jam the get-out-the-vote phone lines run by the New Hampshire Democrats and some local firefighters.

The book arrives the same day New Hampshire voters once again go to the polls to choose presidential nominees, a time when robocalls, e-mails, online videos and other artifacts of political sophistry fly around the ether. Raymond's tale from the inside is worth reading just to gain a sense of perspective on all this highly politicized and often misleading targeted messaging.

Raymond's criminal political shenanigans came in 2002 as Republican John Sununu (New Hampshire) was battling former Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen for a seat in the U.S. Senate, a race Sununu wound up winning.

In 2000, Raymond, a longtime GOP operative, launched a political telemarketing startup called GOPMarketplace.com.

In October 2002, Republican Party regional official James Tobin and the executive director of New Hampshire Republican State Committee, Chuck McGee, asked him to jam Democrat's' get-out-the-vote efforts. (Tobin was at the time responsible for overseeing senate campaigns in several New England states on behalf of the Republican National Committee.)

Raymond consulted lawyers about the phone-jamming scheme and as soon as they informed him that the clearly unethical act wasn't illegal, he quickly hired an Idaho phone-banking firm for the job.

After unleashing 800 calls in one hour on the Democratic phone banks on Election Day – a kind of denial-of-service attack, he received a frantic phone call from McGee himself urging him to stop the jamming because McGee had discovered that it was illegal.

From then on, Raymond was on his own, and it's clear that he's bitter about every aspect of his phone-jamming caper. He's angry about being abandoned by his Republican co-conspirators; at the U.S. attorneys who went after him; and especially at Tobin's expensive defense attorney at the white-shoe law firm of Williams & Connolly, who is portrayed as especially incompetent.

In Raymond's telling, the phone-jamming scheme reached up the ranks to the top echelons of the Republican National Committee and even to the White House. In his estimation, nobody in the RNC would cook up such a scheme without prior authorization from the top.

"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 higher-ups," Raymond writes.

Like any other tell-all boiler-room tale, it's the gossipy details of this political story that make it interesting.

Fallen House Speaker Newt Gingrich, for example, "was a very bright guy, and … he went off on impossible tangents.... During a member orientation meeting, he started talking about the future, the Contract with America and the next hundred days – and before I knew it he was discussing the possibility of farming on Mars."

Meanwhile, Georgia House Republican Bob Barr was "a backwoods knucklehead," who was "using sex to become the face of the Republican Party," referring to Barr's grandstanding in the Clinton impeachment proceedings.

Aside from these brutally frank assessments, Raymond's message is ultimately earnest: He tells Americans that the reason they got stuck with two terms of President Bush's megalomaniac administration is because "election operatives like myself and the kind of politicians who hire us have ensured that idealists can't win elections."

And the tricks will just keep getting nastier, according to Raymond.

Since the New Hampshire attorney general is already investigating a 2008 presidential campaign phone "push poll" that targeted Republican senator John McCain from Arizona, it seems that his prediction is inevitably coming true.

It's just tragic that ethically tone-deaf people like Raymond don't have more insight into how recklessly irresponsible their careers are until they have a few months in the slammer to start living an examined life.