Via a number of alert commentors, the Boston Globe invites all us ‘you people’ serfs to take one last kick at the corpse of the Romney campaign:
… To this day, Romney’s aides wonder how it all went so wrong.
They console each other with claims that the election was much closer than realized, saying that Romney would be president if roughly 370,000 people in swing states had voted differently. Romney himself blamed demographic shifts and Obama’s “gifts”: federal largesse targeted to Democratic constituencies.
But a reconstruction by the Globe of how the campaign unfolded shows that Romney’s problems went deeper than is widely understood. His campaign made a series of costly financial, strategic, and political mistakes that, in retrospect, all but assured the candidate’s defeat, given the revolutionary turnout tactics and tactical smarts of President Obama’s operation.
One of the gravest errors, many say, was the Romney team’s failure, until too late in the campaign, to sell voters on the candidate’s personal qualities and leadership gifts. The effect was to open the way for Obama to define Romney through an early blitz of negative advertising. Election Day polls showed that the vast majority of voters concluded that Romney did not really care about average people…
And the Globe posts an illustration from the MoJo “47%… believe they are entitled” video, in case you wonder how those voters may have come by that idea.
Rich Beeson, the Romney political director who coauthored the now-discredited Ohio memo, said that only after the election did he realize what Obama was doing with so much manpower on the ground. Obama had more than 3,000 paid workers nationwide, compared with 500 for Romney, and hundreds of thousands of volunteers.
“Now I know what they were doing with all the staffs and offices,” Beeson said. “They were literally creating a one-to-one contact with voters,” something that Romney did not have the staff to match…
Leveraging people instead of money? Th’ heck did those wiley Dems come up with such a weird, non-MBA-approved theory?
Seriously, though, this article is a good wrap-up summary of the very basic ways in which the Romney campaign went so wrong… and the Obama campaign worked so well. Not to mention, full of snarkalicious schadenfreude…
More than being reticent, Romney was at first far from sold on a second presidential run. Haunted by his 2008 loss, he initially told his family he would not do it. While candidates often try to portray themselves as reluctant, Tagg insisted his father’s stance was genuine.
“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to . . . run,” said Tagg, who worked with his mother, Ann, to persuade his father to seek the presidency. “If he could have found someone else to take his place . . . he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention.”…
The 2008 fustercluck had given Willard a premonition that us lousy, entitlement-craving peons would insist on prying into Romney’s very private, reticent business dealings and tax returns. Because we have no appreciation for the sacrifice involved when a Great Man on A White Horse Leader like Mitt deigns to lower himself to the task of saving us from ourselves. Such ingrates!
President Obama’s strategy had very different roots. His national field director, Jeremy Bird, drew his inspiration from the time around 2001 when he witnessed, as a young Harvard Divinity student, a group of African-American students in a Roxbury church, pressing their case for school funding with members of the Boston City Council…
And Bird had learned another lesson. He lived in Massachusetts when Romney was elected governor, had studied him and voted against him, and was determined to do everything possible to prevent him from becoming president.
Boston paper to Boston readers: Yeah, getting to know this guy does NOT make him more likeable.
Zac Moffatt, Romney’s digital director… played catch-up from the start. He had 14 people working for him in the primaries and then, around May 1, he submitted a general election plan that required at least 110 people and would eventually have 160. Obama was far ahead. Moffatt recalled his assignment in daunting terms: “Can we do 80 percent of what the Obama campaign is doing, in 20 percent of the time, at 10 percent of the cost?”…
Read the whole thing, and post your favorite Facepalm Moments in the comments!
JPL
I still wonder why Ohio was so close.
Brachiator
Community organizer, bitchez.
Corner Stone
It was always just a bustout. All the R paid staff stuffed their pockets with all the phat cash. All the PAC owners stuffed their offshore accounts with the dough.
They got into the operation and pretty soon the MBAs were funneling units into their own cronys.
Baud
Does the article explain why Romney decided to lie so much?
Brachiator
The media can’t give up their conventional wisdom. They just can’t.
Romney defined himself as an out-of-touch plutocrat who held the majority of citizens in contempt. He and his noxious spouse defined themselves as smarmy oligarchs who felt that the presidency was their destiny.
Every time I heard anything about a Romney fund raiser, it was about a secret event held for multi-millionaires. And most of the time I saw Romney hanging out with someone, or talking about his closest friends, it was in reference to another fat cat.
And this is on top of Romney’s “I will lie to anybody about anything” campaign style.
But the media, like some jackass marketing department, insists that voters cannot recognize disdain and cynical opportunism, and that they will eagerly and passive eat up the bullshit slung by campaign strategists.
And then they wonder why newspapers are going under.
Sir Nose'D
@JPL:
Perhaps I can give you a guided driving tour of the megachurches that replaced the manufacturing jobs so may Ohioans depended on.
PeakVT
“Now I know what they were doing with all the staffs and offices,” Beeson said. “They were literally creating a one-to-one contact with voters,” something that Romney did not have the staff to match…
In modern America there’s a lot of chances to say it, but, really, this is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read. And it’s the result of one of the finest examples of wingnut projection I’ve ever seen.
Triassic Sands
@JPL:
I still wonder (occasionally) why the exit polling in Ohio (and elsewhere) in 2004 was so wrong.
As we have come to expect, Romney, in true Winger style, has things upside down and backward. Voters didn’t simply reward Obama for giving them things, they punished Romney for threatening to take away things that have been an agreed upon part of the social contract for decades. Things that are taken for granted in other developed countries, but which have become the focus of GOP insanity in the US. The fact that Romney is too stupid to see that should automatically disqualify him from being president. The further fact that such a retro-dick could come so close to being elected is a sad symptom of just how messed up the voters in this country can be. My guess is that if a conservative politician in most developed countries ran a campaign equivalent in their own countries to Romney’s here, in most, if not all, cases he or she would be crushed in the election, not lose by a few percentage points.
RIP Mitt “Waaahhhh I’m bored” Romney. You really, really suck.
Villago Delenda Est
If this fuckwit had gotten his head out of his ass for 10 minutes, at any time between August and November, and read ANY of Kay’s posts about the campaign in Ohio, he would have figured this out, assuming he has about a 6th grade reading skill.
Because it was no secret at all that Obama had a massive, well organized ground game. The Rmoney minions thought they could buy a bunch of ads and win that way. Throw more money at the problem. Throwing money works IF YOU KNOW WHERE TO THROW IT, and at grifting Rmoney staffers collecting commissions on ad buys is NOT THE WAY.
jp7505a
There is a post over on Huffington that quotes one of The little Mittens that his father never really wanted to be president. That his heart wasn’t really into it.
I’m glad that the 47% plus a few others could make him a happy man!!!!!!
Citizen_X
Fucking MBAs. No, asshole. You want the same quality, you prepare to spend about the same amount of money and time. Any efficiencies you realize will be marginal at best.
xian
@Villago Delenda Est: this.
I always thought that was our edge. Is it Joe Trippi who recently said the internet has put the soul (actual people) back into politics.
phoebes-in-santa fe
A few things come to mind after reading the article.
1. The complete and utter cluelessness of the Romney campaign’s solid belief that their man was going to win. They ran their campaign extolling Mitt’s competence in the business world and his ability to “read numbers and facts”. And that was how they were going to govern, if elected. Yet, they completely ignored what the polls were saying. Completely ignored. Their campaign was based on wishful thinking and willful disregard of the facts. Didn’t anyone on the campaign figure on Obama’s extensive ground game? No one ever noticed the discrepancy in volunteers and field offices between the two campaigns? Complete morons.
2. All the testimonials of the people Romney had helped along the way? The ones I read about were all Mormons. Or rich. Or both. Did he ever write a will for a dying Jewish boy? Help search a seedy area for a runaway black child? Give money to a needy Hispanic family? Not that I ever read about. So that campaign was right not to highlight those “testimonials” if they were all from Mormons or other rich people (like the rich guy with the yacht who was so appreciative of Romney helping him moor his boat!)
3. Their get-out-the vote Orca system. Why was it only to operate on Election Day? Why not earlier for all those states with early voting?
No, Romney was a lousy candidate and he would be a lousy president. Our great country dodged a bullet – or a whole magazine
JoyfulA
Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald
Say what you will about Balloon-Juice – and there’s lots to say – but this is an impressive use of a blog platform: http://is.gd/l0TKrl
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mir13
It’s not just Money Boo Boo. The whole operation is lousy with liars. They were shocked – SHOCKED! – about the ground game. Puh-leaze. What the fuck did you think they were doing going door-to-door, casing the joint? Then hit it on Election Day when they’re at the polls? That wily Kenyan.
They didn’t want to work. They didn’t want to get out there and interact with their constituency (I don’t blame ’em. Would you? I mean, have you SEEN them? Gag.). They wanted to do the Cliff Notes version of a campaign and rely on money and status to pull them through, as always. They the ones who cheat on the test and think it’s the same as actually knowing and comprehending the material. They really believed that Affirmative Action bullshit. They deserve to be pilloried, cast out, ostracized. Instead, as clueless losers of the moment, they exemplify the GOP, and conservatism in general.
So, how long before Dick Vader gives him a medal?
Baud
@JoyfulA:
Well shit. Now I have to hate dogs. :-(
Chris
Well, it was traditional for Romney’s class of people, especially in the original Gilded Age, to look at politicians as overpaid servants, and running for office as beneath them. I remember reading that even before FDR’s choice of politics branded him as a class traitor among his peers, the very decision to enter politics was something many of them saw as in poor taste.
That said, if there’s any truth to Tagg’s story, it’s in the “mother pushed him to run” story. Rumor has it she wanted to be First Lady even more than Mitt wanted to be President. Wonder how she feels being married to a loser now…
Brachiator
@JPL:
Karl Rove is wondering the exact, same thing.
In retrospect, it is becoming increasingly clear why Romney lost. He believed his own bullshit.
He thought all he had to do was put himself out there (with Sheldon Adelson’s money), and the little people would do what was expected of them.
RaflW
“…sell voters on the candidate’s personal qualities and leadership gifts.”
Really, Mr. Kranish. Do tell us about all of Mitts qualities and, in particular, his gifts for leadership.
He goes on to say that the failure to sell Mittens was “due to the vast majority of voters conclud[ing] that Romney did not really care about average people.”
Correctly concluding this, mister journalist. Based on plenty of self-inflicted evidence and only confirmed by Obama’s negative ads.
Machine-Gun Preacher (formerly Ben Franklin)
How long can we dine on the defeat, as though it’s a bottom-less buffet?
Does the dish Schadenfreude, actually contain nutrition?
Eventually, it will be necessary for us to display the fruits of victory, or rather, the genuine gains, in order to build strong body politics.
Anniecat45
Why did Tagg Romney even bother to make that statement? No one is going to believe it. Why waste time that way?
Villago Delenda Est
@phoebes-in-santa fe:
The testimonial of the Ace of Spades guy on how his technical concerns with ORCA were handwaved away in a flurry of marketing/MBA speak tells you all you need to know about the competence of Rmoney’s tech team. As in NONE. I dine weekly with some System Admin UNIX geek types, and they could not stop talking about the braindeadedness (is that a word? It should be!) of ORCA.
Triassic Sands
Yeah, but even if that had happened, the best “President” Romney could have achieved was a narrow victory in the Electoral College and, like the worst president ever, GWBush II, Romney would have lost the popular vote. Even if the better candidate makes it to the White House (and that was never going to be Romney), having the president-elect lose the popular vote is not a good thing for legitimacy.
mai naem
I was listening to a pretty long interview of I think Glenn Thrush(it was a Politico guy) on XM POTUS about the e-book they have out. I refuse to buy the book because it’s Politico but he had some interesting stuff. Obama was very worried about the fundraising and the money they spent early on destroying Romney. It really was the pros vs. the amateurs. Messina left two voice mails for Romney’s GM on election night that they better get a concession worked up. The Romney campaign was thinking of pulling a 2000 telling reporters to come back on Wed until Rob Portman told them to snap out of it and that they didn’t want to destroy Paul Ryan’s career. Ann Romney actually did not get a good public reaction. The Obama people were most worried about Pawlenty as a Veep pick. He apparently did really well with blue collar people and they thought he could have picked up Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota for Romney. Plouffe is super superstitious. I would never have thought that. To me, Plouffe totally comes across as a numbers/super objective guy.
Bart
Read this article earlier today, and found it to contain far too much conventional wisdom and nowhere near enough actual insight.
And it missed out on tons of facts that have been revealed in post-election write-ups — which is baffling considering this comes a month after most of them.
Barely any new insights here, merely the BS from Tagg claiming his father “wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life”. Yeah, that’s why he spent 20 years doing it. Romney wanted to be president alright; he just didn’t like all that election business and having to be open about his taxes and being in the spotlights etcetera.
And yet someone as unqualified as Romney and with a ridiculously incompetent campaign team still managed to get 47% of the vote. That’s frikking scary. And I blame that score on journalists that pump out mediocre crap like this article: too little, too late.
PeakVT
Stevens said the criticism of the Romney ad strategy is misguided. When advertising by the campaigns is compared, he said, Obama spent twice as much as Romney.
Buck-passing and blame-shifting: it’s the Republican way.
Calouste
@PeakVT:
@Villago Delenda Est:
Or in other words, Obama did pretty much the same thing that he did in 2008. Apparently these campaign gurus couldn’t be bothered to read even one single post mortem article about the 2008 campaign, let alone study it in depth. You know, if you go up against someone who has done this thing before, it might be a good idea to look at how they did it before. It is probably a mixture of being in the bubble, believe in their own MBA awesomeness and outright racism that prevented them from doing so.
Corner Stone
@Chris:
I’m going to go out on a limb and say she felt extremely rich. Very, very wealthy.
MattF
@Baud: Thank you. Painting Romney as a liar and a plutocrat worked because… Romney is a liar and a plutocrat.
Baud
@mai naem:
It’s Politico, so all of that could be fabricated.
amk
Typical mba moron talk.
NotMax
One shudders to contemplate the ocean of odious bile and gleefully served ultra-politicized invective which would have emanated from Romney and his campaign had the Newtown shooting happened before the election.
Gwangung
Oh, good GOD!
It took them THAT long???
This is basic business 101. You can’t substitute for that. And it should have been evident from 2008.
Baud
@PeakVT:
So WTF did Romney spend his money on? Did he piss it all away on
griftersconsultants?SiubhanDuinne
@jp7505a:
At a number of points during the campaign, when Romney did or said something exceptionally dense or stupid even for him, many of us said here (and, I assume, elsewhere) variations on “Gee, it’s almost like he doesn’t want the job. Like he’s trying to lose.” If young Trash or Trick or whatever Rmoney is to be believed, we were on to something.
But if he never wanted to be President, I do think he wanted to win the election. As a notch in his belt, or to prove the White Horse Prophecy or for FSM knows what reasons. If he had managed to pull off/buy/bribe a victory, I think we would have been looking at a puppet presidency that would have made GWB look like Eisenhower at Normandy by comparison. We were mercifully spared.
P.S. This thread reminds me all afresh: whatever has happened to our dear friend UNLIMITED CORPORATE CASH? Haven’t seen him around since, oh gosh, not since early November.
JoyfulA
@Baud: I’ve always kind of preferred cats anyway.
Corner Stone
@Baud:
Romney Bain’d himself.
Chris
@phoebes-in-santa fe:
There is no better summary of why Romney losing meant we dodged a bullet to end all bullets.
Chyron HR
At the risk of being “Politically Incorrect”, Romney literally believed with every fiber of his being that he was the fucking Mormon messiah. You put that one little piece in there and suddenly your 499 random bits of cardboard become a pretty picture of a doggie (metaphorically speaking).
Of course he didn’t need to campaign in Florida and Virginia–the prophecy said he would win! Of course he wasted his money competing in Pennsylvania, a state that simply will not go red–the prophecy said he would win! He didn’t need to field test the Jumbowhale system–the prophecy said he would win!
JasonF
I guess Mitt wasn’t quite as out of touch as I thought, since the rest of us didn’t want him to be president either.
WereBear
Thank goodness their bench was so shallow, their candidates so insular, and their consultants so greedy. Still, it is a national disgrace that Romney got more than 27% of the vote.
He was absolutely the worst candidate of my lifetime.
So we simply have to wait for a lot of Republicans to die off, sad to say. They have shown that nothing their party can do will drive them away. People have trouble with change at the best of times, but “conservatives” are proud that they don’t have to change their minds.
At all. About anything.
Kathy in St. Louis
You can read this stuff all day, but, in the end, he was not a likeable man, and he didn’t like the people he sought to lead. It was written all over him. It really wasn’t about someone else (Obama campaign) defining him. He defined himself very early on, and gave us a true glimpse of who he really was by not releasing his tax returns, claiming that he liked firing people, and changing posistions on each and every major question more than once. Honestly, no one could tell who he was, and a majority of the people in this country who voted had decided that getting to know him really wasn’t worth the effort.amk
@Bart: Yup. It’s just the bot campaign team’s
talking pointslies stenography.PeakVT
@Baud: From what I’ve seen, yes, a lot of money went to consultants or consultants taking a cut of ad placements (which has been the way it has been done traditionally in American political campaigns, though Democrats have been slowly moving away from that model over the past decade). I think Stevens is both trying to distract with absolute numbers and trying to shift blame away from the campaign to outside groups, which did a majority of the pro-Romney advertising spending.
Suffern ACE
@Calouste: yeah. I don’t get this “unprecedented” ground campaign thing. How much larger? The one in 2008 was pretty big.
I also like that the field officer doesn’t appear to know what field offices are supposed to do. Contacting voters seems like a good idea whose time probably came 100 years ago. What did they think Obama was going to do with his? Hold cocktail hours for Rangers?
srv
If I could really channel my inner Galt, I’d gather the ten smartest people I know and approach the Koch’s with THE IT solution for the GOP.
We could make a lot of money, but I’m not sure there’s enough digital lipstick to make that pig pretty in 2016.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
OK, let’s take them at their word—that even after the 2008 Obama campaign and observing how his ground game was working in this one, they were still completely dumbfounded upon discovering how that was accomplished.
Let’s also assume the worst case scenario (for us): that they learn their lesson from this and decide to implement the same voter-contact and door-to-door techniques next time.
Who do they get to do it? Mormon missionaries? Jehovah’s Witnesses? The paid genetic defectives they have collecting signatures in shopping malls? Gadsden-flag-waving Hoveround Heroes with “Keep the Gummint’s hand offen mah Medicare!” bumper-stickers?
Anybody that the average person is going to want to interact with will be working for our side, not theirs. The recruiting problem seems insoluble to me….
El Caganer
Remarkable. The election’s been over for 2 months, he lost, nobody really remembers who he is – and he and his spawn are still lying. Sort of the Bizarro World version of the Little Engine that Could.
Valdivia
Everything coming out of the Romney camp’s muth are lies. Obama didn’t spend twice as much, their budgets were roughly the same. Obama just made his money go farther in things that mattered. These people thought they could win an air war and that Rove and CU would give them even more firepower. Idiots.
katie5
@Chyron HR: Call it that, or it was his “destiny”. Either way, it was his time. I’m mostly pissed off at the Boston Globe. I find this to be lazy reporting, gleaned from other sources (e.g., the Harvard roundtable, the ORCA article) rather than in depth investigative reporting. For example,
Okay, reporters, tell us why you his strategists believed that and what the rift is. For people closely following politics, it’s fairly obvious. For the rest, why are you having your readers guess?
Lee Rudolph
@JoyfulA: Unlimited corporate cats?
AxelFoley
@NotMax:
Seriously. I still remember the smug look on that prick’s face after his press conference on the Benghazi attack.
PeakVT
@Chris: There is no better summary of why Romney losing meant we dodged a bullet to end all bullets.
Dodging Romney was a big deal, but I think dodging the wave of anti-empiricism that manifested itself in the public discourse during the last couple of months was an even bigger deal. Of course, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where Nate Silver and other poll-crunchers would have been wrong But if they had been, the anti-empiricism movement would have compounded the disasters of a Romney presidency greatly.
katie5
@Bart: Absolutely. Article was a waste, not a reverse engineering of the campaign.
West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.)
@Brachiator: Yeah, the term “investigative reporter” is akin to “typewriter repairman” — just not a lot left. But we do get Tweets and he said/she said journalism, so that’s pretty good (he said sarcastically).
Is anyone else, by the way, already getting tired of Romney stories? I can still enjoy a “Wasn’t Bush a jerk” story, but I think I’ve already lost my interest in Romney — he’s just a soulless void.
Regnad Kcin
@Chyron HR: At least that’s what Joseph Smith told him the prophecy said
The Dangerman
@El Caganer:
Have to keep options open for 2016 (I could see him running again, although he isn’t getting out of the primary).
West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.)
@Anniecat45: He’s probably trying to keep his own name relevant in case he decides to run for office somewhere down the road. Lucky us, we may get another legacy family, a la the Bush clan!
Gin & Tonic
To me, it’s simple. There are only two ways to get people to work the type of hours needed here – you pay them a ton and hold out the promise of enormous future wealth, like Goldman Sachs, or you get them passionate, like the Obama campaign. You can buy loyalty, but you can’t buy passion. And absent the profit motive, when the guy at the top is a cold fish, you won’t get passion. They thought they could buy it.
It’s the Rumsfeldian fight a war without getting your hands dirty theory.
feebog
Not only did they believe their own bullshit, they bought into what Rassmussen and Gallup were saying as well. Not to mention thier own internal polling which was wildly optimistic. It was like they forgot that there was this thing called the “Electoral College” and were fixated on the national polling. We kept looking at Nate Silver and Professor Wang, they were stuck with Scott Rassmussen.
Mike in NC
Edited for accuracy.
hitchhiker
The ground game folk for W were all those born-agains . . . that’s who was out there doing the legwork on behalf of his actual base, the 1%. But while those born-agains might be persuaded to show up and display their disdain for Obama, they were never going to feel the thrill up their legs that is a crucial requirement for that kind of commitment.
That was one factor. The other was that inside the R bubble, it’s just taken for granted that Obama is a bad joke. Inside the R bubble, they don’t know that normal people see the president positively, like his wife, and cringe at the racist rhetoric. (I have close family members who are utterly shocked when I don’t laugh at their nigger jokes. Seriously.) The Rs also don’t know how deeply that rhetoric cuts people of color, or how much it motivates them to push back. They truly believe it’s about the president giving minorities free stuff . . . which makes minorities hate them even more.
One thing I haven’t heard much talk about is that the R lack of response to Newtown is just one more way that they’re going to lose the vote of women. Women have no desire for a “man-card” but they are very interested in seeing their kids walk through the door at the end of every day. It’s unbelievable to me that the Rs who claim to want to expand their outreach to somebody besides rural white males have not noticed this.
Joe Buck
Really, Tagg? Sorry, I don’t believe that. A man who didn’t want to be president wouldn’t have worked so hard to destroy his own honor to achieve it (by repeatedly changing positions, sucking up to the base, and attacking his own accomplishments).
Sounds like sour grapes to me (in Aesop’s original fable, when the fox couldn’t get the grapes, he claimed that he never really wanted them).
opie_jeanne
@The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge: Er, not the Jehovah’s Witnesses, because they do not vote and are not interested in politics. It’s one of their Special Beliefs.
I don’t know where the Republicans are going to find volunteers to go door-to-door in four years. Most of the people who were available this year will be a bit too old to do it and they don’t seem to be attracting many young people.
MattF
@hitchhiker: But… but… everyone knows that girls like a man with a big gun.
JPL
@Joe Buck: It’s an old fashioned play ground taunt that starts nanny, nanny poo, poo, stick your face in …ah never mind..
JPL
@MattF: depends on the meaning of gun..
red*cted
@Triassic Sands:
In Canada we are graced by a “Bush Lite” government elected by 37% of the Canadians who even bothered to get out and vote. Hence, we have a government that is bent on buying 35 billion dollars worth of stealth fighter jets that are only good for attacking another country (watch out Greenland!) and are ready to “privatize” the medical marijuana industry and make it illegal for the hippies to grow their own.
Schlemizel
@Chris:
Maybe she thought First Lady would compensate her for all the years she has spent as Mrs. Willard Rmoney?
MattF
OT, but Oh, boy. Michael Kimmelman, the NYT architecture critic, does not like this new art museum in Amsterdam:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/arts/design/amsterdams-new-stedelijk-museum.html?hp
red*cted
In Canada we are graced by a “Bush Lite” government elected by 37% of the Canadians who even bothered to get out and vote. Hence, we have a government that is bent on buying 35 billion dollars worth of stealth fighter jets that are only good for attacking another country (watch out Greenland!) and are ready to “privatize” the medical marijuana industry and make it illegal for the hippies to grow their own.
Maude
@West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.):
He’s boring.
Mister Harvest
Wow, that unlimited corporate cash sure made a big difference.
Schlemizel
@mai naem:
Pawlenty would have cost Rmoney votes in MN – he did not leave the state with any warm feelings for his maladministration. But I could see him and his fake blue collar bullshit getting them votes in Ohio and Wisconsin.
PeakVT
@MattF: Looks like a spaceship from some D-list sci-fi movie.
Schlemizel
@SiubhanDuinne:
He’ll be back in 16-18 months with the same old BS. Unless he has graduated high school and has some tough classes in college that take his time
Jewish Steel
That was a lot of words to say, “Republicans be some stupid motherfuckers.”
Hey? Boston Globe? Is this true? A little help here? Do some journalism?
Cmm
“Can we do 80 percent of what the Obama campaign is doing, in 20 percent of the time, at 10 percent of the cost?”
As I learned during my time as a tech writer at a software company, the answer is no. The saying there was, you can have it fast, you can have it cheap, or you can have it work: pick two.
Machine-Gun Preacher (formerly Ben Franklin)
@opie_jeanne:
not the Jehovah’s Witnesses, because they do not vote and are not interested in politics. It’s one of their Special Beliefs.
quite true. They eschew politics and have the correct view of involvement in same when you consider Jesus Christ, and the life he prescribed for adherents/
Mark S.
And the Steelers would be in the playoffs if they had scored roughly ten more points in three key games.
What loser talk.
cmorenc
@Triassic Sands:
Karl Rove’s utter disbelief on election night 2012 that Ohio had just been called so early for Obama by Fox News’s own quants speaks volumes about why the exit polling in 2004 in Ohio was so much off the offical Ken Blackwell-as-Ohio-SOS numbers. In 2012 Rove had been smugly confident that enough GOP manipulations of Ohio’s election system were in place to swing any plausibly close election in their favor. His shock was both that the true margin was too much for the GOP electoral machine to steal through any form of manipulation they could plausible get away with, and also that the Ohio Secretary of State had apparently recognized the same thing and had implicitly signaled on election night that he would refuse to take the risk of even trying.
Rove clearly confidently thought he had set up the “fix” for Ohio, and couldn’t believe it had failed so badly to come even close to working.
Brachiator
@West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.):
And here, these hacks are neither investigators nor reporters. They are mere stenographers, writing down what the GOP strategists say and passing it off as analysis.
It’s always lazy when you talk to campaign insiders about voters instead of talking to actual voters about their choices. The sad thing is that teams of reporters probably spent months putting this stuff together. And still, the only reason that they are regurgitating this crap is because it’s a slow news day and people are getting their holidays on and not paying attention to the news unless something earth shaking happens.
Mark S.
@NotMax:
Mitt would have gotten slaughtered if that happened, since he obviously would never stand up to the gun nuts. Hell, he’s so stupid he probably would have gone to an NRA rally the next day.
pseudonymous in nc
Others have said it, but if that’s how MBAs manage campaigns, what does that say for how they manage companies?
I know that the permanent political campaign class live a kind of perennial grift — because campaigns are usually small-c conservative. The Obama digital team had a weird kind of advantage in ’08 and ’12 because there wasn’t really an established group of “online Dem campaign experts” to go to, but it still took a leap of faith in the weird-looking techies with their devops and agile development and shit. On the GOP side, you did have a bunch of wingnut welfare internet campaign types, and they were happy to take Rmoney’s rmoney. (I’m still amazed at the people who were brought in by the Obama digital team on short-term contracts just to get certain things locked in, or to establish best practices across the entire team. I just wish that the federal government had that kind of flexibility.)
@Cmm:
The Mythical Man-Month does not grow old, even though it was written when software engineers were programming S/360 mainframes.
Lojasmo
@Machine-Gun Preacher (formerly Ben Franklin):
poor thing
kay
I think it went much deeper than this, all the way down to the county level. I actually think the over- confidence and under-estimating Obama’s strength started way before the skewed polls nonsense, as far back as 2011.
I heard it again and again; Obama was “toast”.
The Romney campaign was reflecting/ believed the delusions of the base, NOT creating those delusions.
Republicans here loathed Obama, so they thought anyone could beat him. They live in a bubble now. They’re not tethered to reality. All the shit that came after was the GOP base trying to realign reality with what they already believed.
I think the piece has the sequence wrong. The delusions of the base came FIRST, the Romney campaign followed the base.
shortstop
Beeson has got to be the stupidest, least observant motherfucker ever to call himself a campaign political director. Fortunately for our entertainment, he’s so stupid he doesn’t even know not to announce to the Boston Globe how much he doesn’t know. The plaintive “How could we have guessed?” cries about information anybody mildly interested in the political process had about the Obama campaign of 2012 AND the Obama campaign of 2008 AND the Bush campaign of 2004 are really tasty.
Machine-Gun Preacher (formerly Ben Franklin)
@Lojasmo:
Nice talkin’ wit ya.
CaseyL
It’s kind of amazing, how quickly the GOP became nothing more than a graft-&-grift operation, with the Romney campaign being the capstone project. I would love to see a comprehensive breakdown of where all that money went, esp. the money that didn’t go directly to advertising but disappeared into various “consultant” and “media buyer” pockets.
Here’s a question: Did the capstone project succeed?
I mean, sure, a billion dollars is one hell of a successful con. But four years is a long time to wait for another payday of that magnitude.
What will the prime grifters until then? It’s hard to go back to the small time stuff, birtherism and omg-gays-gettin-married, after pulling off a big one. I don’t see gun control as a big enough issue, if for no other reason than that well’s been pretty thoroughly plumbed. (Plus the NRA already owns it and is probably not big on sharing.)
They’ve been waiting for years for Social Security to be gutted; were counting on a Romney Administration to do that for them. That ain’t gonna happen. Obama may or may not fiddle around with CPI; even if he does, that’s hardly the trillion dollar windfall “financial advisors” have been dreaming about.
ACA? GOP-governed states have opted out. That means the Federal government will set up exchanges for the people in those states. I frankly don’t know if they’ll be required to buy through the exchanges, or if they’ll be able to take their subsidies and go to an insurance company on their own. If the latter, that will be on the grifters’ radar. (And lord knows, people who voted in the GOP governors in the first place will be dumb enough to get fleeced by non-existent insurance companies.)
What if they decide the GOP faithful are played out, and decide to try working the left-hand side of the street?
Sly
@Brachiator:
You’re forgetting one of the great cardinal rules of American politics: that it is an unforgivable breach of political etiquette and the basest of tactics to directly quote the crazy and/or evil shit that Republicans actually say.
kay
The GOP base really believe Obana’s stupid, an “affirmative action” candidate, a failed President.
They believe this. They never hear anything else. “Romney” didn’t matter. They believed any nominally sane Republican would beat Obama handily. They didn’t worry AT ALL about that train wreck of a primary because they thought they had it in the bag from 2010 on.
They have a much bigger problem than a bad campaign. Their base believes everything they hear on FOX.
Corner Stone
@CaseyL:
This is what they have been since at least Reagan. What do you think the rise of the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition was? Ralph Reed? Abramoff Any of this strike a bell?
Corner Stone
@CaseyL:
No, no, no. The whole coming gun control “debate” will be nothing but grifting opportunities. Chances to advise school districts, governors, mayors. And a pipeline of public funds that will eventually be assigned to go to “security” where these grifters and con men will step in and decide where the pie is going.
You’re thinking small. These guys are pros.
Lojasmo
@Machine-Gun Preacher (formerly Ben Franklin):
I can safely say, with the backup of many gay servicemembers, and a bunch of people who are now insured under the PPACA, you can fuck right off.
kyle
@Bart: You’re blaming the Boston Globe? Try 8% unemployment. That gives any challenger a shot at winning.
rikyrah
the laugh for me today.
Willard didn’t want to be President?
G-T-F-O-H
Willard was a Mormon Gollum and the Presidency was his `precious’.
Sorry, Tagg, nobody spends 40 million of their own money on something they didn’t want.
Machine-Gun Preacher (formerly Ben Franklin)
@Lojasmo:
That’s just trickle-down, no pun intended.
Jay C
BTW, where did that (wildly over-optimistic, IMO, but what do I know?) figure of “370,000 votes” come from? Did they hire some unemployed math geek to run the numbers and figure out how many votes would have to shift to give Mitt a one-vote “win” in just enough states to proved a one-vote EV win?
But then, as Bill Clinton reminded us, it’s the arithmetic….
Ron Thompson
@JPL:
Ohio is, thank God, pretty much of a unique case. The more Appalachian areas in the southeast are trending strongly Republican, and the Indiana-like areas in the west have always been so, while the second and third-biggest counties, Franklin (Columbus) and Hamilton (Cincinnati) are trending strongly Democratic. There’s a much better chance of Virginia or Florida becoming a solidly Democratic state at the presidential level in the next eight years than that Ohio will do so, because they attract young people while Ohio exports them. The good news is, we don’t need it.
CaseyL
@Corner Stone: Oh, the Evangelicals undoubtedly were a key ingredient. And much ink has been devoted to analyzing how the Evangelicals ate the GOP – driving out nearly anyone who isn’t plumb nuts and rabid-dog mean. It’s just interesting that their financial model also ate the GOP.
The school districts who get taken by “security consultants” will, bet you anything, be in GOP-voting districts. Because individual districts won’t make the hiring decisions; the school boards will. GOP-controlled school boards are fundie-friendly, already primed to buy in to More Guns Everywhere, and won’t hire outside their insider network.
mainmati
@Corner Stone: Exactly. Early on, Rove and the others saw Citizens United as a great way to make a ton of money regardless of whether the GOP candidate got elected or not. It was all about manipulating wealthy people to give a truly enormous amount of money into largely TV ads and skimming a nice percentage off on the side regardless of outcome. Your modern GOP at work.
Bill Arnold
@kay:
Fox News helped shaped the alt reality, and helped hold it together in the face of pushback from real reality.
(Fox became an overt defender of alt reality to me the second time they put a “D” next to a Republican involved in a scandal. I was admittedly slow.)
Edit: I see you place some blame on Fox later.
Chuck Butcher
If you’re wondering where the grifters go next, I’ll just point out that the House and one third of the Senate are up for grabs every two years. In a couple states the Senate quite some time ago showed how to use big money to get what you want. It doesn’t even take that big of big money to plow ground in a small population state and CD’s aren’t real big pop. wise.
Bill Arnold
@Corner Stone:
Armed guards in every school is a serious mis-allocation of scarce resources, and should be cast as such. Limiting school security changes to some infrastructure changes (locks, barriers, escape routes, etc) would be an order of magnitude cheaper and wouldn’t have the downside possibilities inherent in having 100,000 (*) more guns in schools, like a guard shooting a kid who made a threatening move with a toy gun (or whatever), or somebody grabbing a gun from a guard and using it.
(* 99,000 public schools in the US in 2010))
ruemara
@kay: This. Exactly. They truly, truly believed that only lower class, worthless, minority types of a shady ethical nature liked Obama and the gloss of the “cool, black guy” as president was over from ’09.
RobNYNY1957
I was never able to figure out why Romney lied about being CEO of Bain from 1999 to 2002. He signed SEC filings, he was in the press, he had to invent the lie that he “retroactively resigned”, and (most importantly) no acting CEO came forward to corroborrate the lie.
Oh, and then Mrs. Romney said that she knows what hardship is because while Mitt was going to Harvard Law and Harvard Business, they had only his stock portfolio to live on. Oddly, 47% might find that to be privilege, not hardship.
Peter
@JPL:
Er, well it wasn’t really that close at all. Obama won by almost exactly 3 points in Ohio, ending up with 166,000 more votes than Romney. It seemed very close on election night, but as the Fox News election desk pointed out to Karl Rove, there were a lot of votes still to come from areas that favored Obama.
Same nationwide: lots of people on election night were talking about how Obama barely had an advantage in the national popular vote, but he ended up winning by 3.7 points.
Steeplejack
@pseudonymous in nc:
Let’s put nine women on this project and we can have that baby in one month!
Kib
My favorite passage was towards the end.
His “source” was Matt F*n’ Drudge. Talk about living in a bubble.
From the Hack List:
That shock went all the way up to the candidate himself.
Birthmarker
@kay: My Facebook page proves this every day…
Tom Q
@Jay C: I think it’s even more cherry-picked than that. My first thought was, wait a minute, he’d have needed to reverse VA/FL/OH, and that’s got to be well over 370,000 votes…plus you’d need PA on top of that, so you’re talking like 600,000.
What they seem to have done is gone to lower-population states that Barack carried by 5-6% (NH, IA, NV, CO) and decided they could reverse each one of those (as you say, by 1 vote) and, throwing in I guess FL, have won by a hair.
I guess this is the kind of thing you do to console yourself when you lose something you thought you might win. There have been more legitimate such cases — Ford only lost OH and MS by a combined 26,000 votes in ’76, which determined the election, and Kerry needed to reverse only 59,000 votes in one state, OH, in ’04 to be the winner. This is not in that category.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Citizen_X:
No. Flat fucking no. If you want 80 percent of the results in 20 percent of the time, prepare to spend a minimum of 200 percent of the cost.
Idiots.
mere mortal
“post your favorite Facepalm Moments in the comments!”
This, though it is such a moment in regards to the Boston Globe, not Romney or anyone else:
“It was, they said, more fun than the fantasy war game Dungeons & Dragons.”
Not sure I’ve ever seen anything more humiliatingly stupid written down.
karen marie
Of course, they couldn’t do that, because if Romney gave specifics or held to one position for more than five minutes, anything his base would embrace was anathema to Dems and independents, and vice versa.
Romney was an incompetent candidate but it was the Republican agenda that lost the election.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Cmm:
Same thing in civil engineering.
karen marie
Liar, liar, pants on fire! I’m shocked! Shocked, I say!
Bill
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: Same thing anywhere that anyone who knows what they’re doing is at work.
Jewish Steel
@Kib: That was my favorite part too.
James E Powell
@karen marie:
As long as he votes against any tax increases for the rich his sins will be forgiven. In 21st Century America, religion is all about money, who you hate, and money.
SRW1
“Can we do 80 percent of what the Obama campaign is doing, in 20 percent of the time, at 10 percent of the cost?”
Shame really that the reaction of the uber-honchos in the Romney campaign to this point isn’t reported. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if it had been: Get it done with 8 percent of the cost in 15 percent of the time.
Chris
@James E Powell:
QFT.
Dream On
His arrest is an early Xmas present for me! The gift of laughter and derision. I like my gift.
He probably drinks Jolt Cola too.
Altus
@Citizen_X: that Fucking MBAs response is the best thing Ive read this year. I think MBA courses are the most destructive thing to have happneded in the last 200 years
Montarvillois
No mention in the Globe article about the hidden tax returns, surely a significant factor leading to mistrust of Romney.
Triassic Sands
@cmorenc:
That was my point.
Following Nate Silver, I was confident that Obama would win…unless the GOP was able to steal the election. I had no doubt they would try.
W. Kiernan
“…the vast majority of voters concluded that Romney did not really care about average people…” What drivel. If I despise a group of people, if I absolutely detest them, then you can’t just say I don’t care about them.
skeptonomist
How about this explanation: it’s in the interest of campaign consultants and strategists to have people believe that elections depend on what they do, whether the election is won or lost, so job one for them is selling the media on their own importance. It looks like they have succeeded – apparently they have even sold the writer of this post.
Matt
Ah, that reluctance TOTALLY explains why he spent all of 2009, 2010, AND 2011 also still running for President.
FFS, does the staff at the Globe even ASK fucking questions?
Ramalama
Not sure why Romney’s ‘signature achievement’ per David Axelrod was the health care law in MA. He signed it, yes, but he did not champion it nor did he do much if anything to create it.
dswagz
@phoebes-in-santa fe:
According to Anonymous, ORCA was a Vote-Flipping system. That’s why it was only flipped on the night of the election. ‘Might explain Rove’s inability to face reality and melt-down, and Rmoney’s cock-sure belief in his destiny to rule.
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/20/did_anonymous_stop_rove_stealing_the_election/
StringOnAStick
We’ve described many different parts of this elephant so far, and each insight has been useful in the kalidoscope O’ fail that was the Rmoney campaign.
To me, the race was won by the ground troops – the volunteers. If you are a FAUX-watching dittohead, you were sure the whole thing was in the bag for your side, and in your heart you hoped that that scamp Karl Rove was going to tweak things just the right amount to make sure Gawd’s candidate won but wasn’t too obvious/indictable about it. Since it was all taken care of, you didn’t need to get out there and volunteer; unlimited corporate cash meant you didn’t need to do any of that uncomfortable and unpleasant interaction with nonmembers of the tribe.
I occassionally work for a nice DDS who puts up with the wingnut male RDH from the next office over; that guy is still unable to face reality and beyond bitter about the election outcome (which was solidly blue here in CO). Even though the nice DDS paid for a Christmas lunch at a really nice place for 16 people, half of which were NOT his employees, said wingnut still had to slash him with a few nasty wingnut zingers during the meal (which made the nice DDS’s employees want to kill him). This guy could never be safely unleashed as a volunteer for a campaign – too volatile; I have to wonder if that would be the case for a lot of potential Rethug campaign volunteers.
Stentor
Republicans always want to bend/ignore the laws of physics, then they’re so surprised when reality & the universe bites them hard on the asscheeks & takes a good chunk out of their worldview. But it never seems to hold, the ignorant part of them just grows right back.