So Much For The Myth Of The Efficient, Organized Romney Campaign
The post at Ace Of Spades by someone who had volunteered as a poll watcher for the Romney campaign is really quite revealing. Rather than quoting it at length, I’ll just recommend reading the whole thing.
A friend of mine has worked on several campaigns over the years, and gave me the best piece of advice I’ve ever gotten about watching an election: how the candidates run their campaign is how they will govern if they win. Romney’s campaign never seemed focused or efficient to me, but this is a bigger mess than I would have anticipated.
This post over at PowerLine is amusing in retrospect.
I have said from the primaries that they were running a crappy campaign. Romney was just lucky to be running against clowns like Perry, Newt, Cain etc.
Best military analogy – No plan survives first contact.
It’s not Romney, as he did not control the minutia of the campaign, but whoever ran it was overly paranoid and control. Unfortunately this is pandemic in Republican campaigns. I have never been an admirer of Republican political consultants/campaign managers.
Wow. That sounds like Sunoco.
Wow. What a clusterf**k.
What a stupid blog you linked to. Obama wickedly discouraged voting for Romney by saying bad things about him – and that’s somehow cynical and unethical?
I keep trying to think Repubs aren’t just stupid, but the Internet makes that difficult. Very, very difficult.
Per Allahpundit (the last sane Republican partisan?):
Organizational incompetence and Dean Chambers as their internal pollster. How did Obama not beat him by 5+ points?
Wow. If this is what a Romney organization is like, THANK GOD he wasn’t elected. The last thing we need in the White House is a Dilbertesque pointy-haired manager.
Oh, and if Romney had ever worked as, say, a community organizer, he might have had a little insight into how this should be done and, maybe more importantly, what could go wrong and how to account for problems so that they wouldn’t crippled the whole effort.
It sure is, and it needs to be read together with this:
It’s ironic that the supposed genius CEO turns out to be a terrible manager. And these are the “job creators”? The emperor has no clothes.
That read was quite a pip, especially this gem from Frank Luntz…
Poor Mitt…he was Swiftboated!!!
This is similar to how a political party does everything it can to paint government as a horrible, evil thing while that party’s members do everything they can to get elected to positions of power in government…and then turn out to be horrible at governing…
More priceless background. HuffPo, 11/1:
There are over 500 comments on that Ace of Spades post. Of course personally I am above schadenfreude, so I wouldn’t read them all for that reason. However, I did read them all; it must have been for some other reason.
I will share some of my favorites. First here are a few that follow a similar theme, so I grouped them together.
Here’s one comment I especially like:
Now here are a bunch of others, more or less in order of appearance. I know it looks like I’m pasting in the whole thread, but this is just the best 20%, and edited:
[Note: when you see “fvck,” it’s like that because I changed it. The other site allows the proper spelling, but this site doesn’t.]
Clearly this guy was an Obama operative…I’ll bet he jammed the garage door too!
A lot of the commenters seriously suspect sabotage, and you can see why: because it was so intensely, colossally bad.
@Geek, Esq.:
That quote needs to be at the top of the OTB front page for the next year. Romney didn’t know he was going to lose. He was so feckless, so unused to hearing hard, true things, and so determined never to hear them, that he surrounded himself with yes-men, and was completely misled. He was woefully, woefully wrong, and all it would have taken was 5 minutes on the internet to learn the truth, and he literally could not do that.
And this is the man James wanted to run our country for 4 years.
Those of you wanting some kind of Republican reform…if James votes for Republicans who are so horrendously stupid and ignorant, where is this groundswell of reasonable Republicans going to come from? Because if James won’t support it, who will?
That was a good read, Doug, thanks. I would like to add this contribution as well.
Mitt Romney’s Campaign Cancels Staffers Credit Cards In The Middle Of The Night
I think that beyond the efficiency of ORCA, The fact that the right wing’s immediate response is still to blame liberals is the real issue.
If you can’t even begin to admit that you have screwed up, you will never perform better.
Yes, there are a bunch of comments claiming the system failed because it was sabotaged, and also a bunch of comments claiming Mitt lost because of voter fraud. Also a bunch of comments blaming voters, like this one from hotair:
Romney had been running for president for six years and still did not have a full gasp of the issues, how the government works, or policy. Does anyone really believe that someone who was so disinterested in politics or governance was really going to run an efficient or well run campaign.
Does anyone really believe that a political party that has alienated the Ivy Leaguers and is run by college drop outs like Karl Rove was going to run an effective campaign?
And the great “CEO” in charge of this is the person roughly half of the US want to put in charge of the country?
Community organizer 1, CEO 0
@jukeboxgrad: God, Vincent Harris? Now everyone in national politics knows what it used to be like for us poor bastards in Virginia.
Yes, exactly. As bookdragon said:
And as a couple of Ace’s commenters said:
Nobody says ‘power to the people’ anymore, but that’s what this story is about.
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This is well and truly astonishing. Boatloads of cash, and six years of running bought them this? Compare this to the Time/Swampland piece about Obama’s data-driven campaign.
For contrast: I’m a registered undeclared in NH. I voted in the Republican primary–this is public record. We were contacted a few months ago via a polling call, and when it was determined the household was leaning to Obama, we were contacted by phone, by someone locally (caller ID). She touched base with us periodically throughout the campaign, not overly aggressive, just checking in. As the election drew near, we received more frequent calls, more often than not by the same young lady. We had OFA people knock on the door on Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday. The last call I received from Sarah, the same campaign worker, was just after I got home from voting.
It was, from a GOTV perspective, pitch-perfect. Pleasantly persistent, and data-driven.
John Hinderaker on George Bush (link):
John Hinderaker on Mitt Romney (link):
Priceless.
It’s pretty sobering to realize that a bunch of Democrats who hang out on OTB had a much clearer idea of how the election was shaping up than GOP nominee Mitt Romney, or any of the people he surrounded himself with.
When McCain was putting out his “Pennsylvania is in play” BS in 2008, they knew it was BS, but they also figure idiots like bithead would fall for it, which they did. Romney and his crew actually believed in the fictional world the right has created. And this guy might have become the President. F***ing scary.
Truly, the problem isn’t that elites are using lies in the media to control us like pawns. It’s that the elites are buying their own lies.
That’s seriously not good. That’s “eve of the French Revolution”-level detachment.
Yes. The former isn’t surprising, but I find the latter quite surprising. I’m shocked to learn that Mitt was shocked by his loss.
Speaking of lying and denial, one of the most interesting things about Orca is the lying that went on (link):
Sounds just like Baghdad Bob. So were those “senior Romney campaign advisers” just lying to the reporters when they said Orca “was up and running just fine?” Or were they also lying to themselves? At this moment, I think mostly the former, and just partially the latter.
Aside from lying to reporters, they were also lying to their own volunteers. Above I cited this statement from an Orca volunteer:
I have read all 616 comments at Ace’s place, and many other volunteers made similar statements. Here’s another example that I already cited:
The detachment from reality is mind-boggling. But it’s the exact same attitude that Mitt displayed when he tried to convince us that his impossible tax numbers were going to work. It’s also the same attitude that Cheney displayed when he said “my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”
The GOP has become a party of lunatics. I used to think the core problem was dishonesty, but now it’s dawning on me that a bigger problem might be insanity.
It’s not unheard of for a large group of people to go nuts together. It’s called mass hysteria.
Something else that stuns me is the number of people who fail to understand what Orca tells us, which was perfectly summarized by bookdragon, near the top of this thread:
A commenter at Ace’s place also put it nicely:
But many, many people don’t see it that way. In those comments, a much more common attitude is this:
Notice the attitude that’s being expressed: ‘Mitt was an innocent, naive, helpless victim, and he had no idea that his organization had been infiltrated by a bunch of incompetent boobs who cleverly managed to hide their incompetence from him.’ In this and many similar comments there is a complete lack of awareness that the most important “IDIOT that was involved in this project” is Mitt, and he is the one that does not “deserve a job.”
That same staggering lack of awareness is reflected in a follow-up post at Ace’s place (by Ace or “Andy”):
The lack of awareness is staggering. He says “DO NOT SUPPORT ANYONE WHO WOULD HIRE THIS PERSON.” He is oblivious to the fact that “HIRE THIS PERSON” is precisely what Mitt did. So if we follow the suggested rule (“DO NOT SUPPORT ANYONE WHO WOULD HIRE THIS PERSON”), the first and most obvious step is this: “DO NOT SUPPORT” Mitt.
The same lack of awareness is even reflected in a follow-up post by JohnE, the person who broke this story open in the first place:
Who are “these guys?” He means the people working for Mitt, but not Mitt himself. Which makes no sense.
This is supposedly the party of personal responsibility, but there is no awareness that Mitt was responsible for hiring a bunch of clowns, which means that Mitt is a clown. And there is also no awareness by Andy and JohnE and all the other clowns that supported Mitt that supporting a clown who hires clowns makes them all clowns.
Ace’s commenters find a zillion ways to blame someone other than Mitt. Here are some examples (I’m paraphrasing): ‘it’s obama’s fault, because he sabotaged the software; it’s the voters’ fault, because they should be self-motivated and not require GOTV; it’s the RNC’s fault [even though Orca was a Romney project, not an RNC project].’ What is virtually impossible to find is someone saying this: ‘I thought Mitt was a great manager, but obviously that’s not true, so my supporting him was a mistake.’
And notice the astounding hypocrisy that is evident when the shoe is on the other foot. With something like Fast and Furious or Benghazi, Obama is held responsible for every allegedly bad decision that takes place at any level of his organization, even though there are numerous layers of management separating Obama from the person who made the decision. Why? Because ‘the buck stops here.’
But when it comes to something like Orca, these clowns don’t see it that way. Amazing.
Send in the Clowns…
http://www.zimbio.com/watch/POZRBXMloK9/Send+in+the+Clowns/The+Simpsons
This is a good moment to recall how often we were told about Mitt’s allegedly stellar management skills. NR, 5/22/12:
Fox, 7/26/12:
Haley Barbour on Fox, 11/1/11:
WaPo, 2/12/12:
David Brooks, 3/22/12:
Of course there’s a lot more like that, but those are just some of my favorites. So it’s not just “So Much For The Myth Of The Efficient, Organized Romney Campaign.” It’s so much for the myth of Romney himself being a good manager. It turns out that Mitt’s “extraordinary management skills” are a sham, a fraud, just like so many other things about the man and his party.
And one more, from election day (NR):