Look Closely

From mistermix at Balloon Juice:

I’ve always thought that there was something fishy about the GOP’s GOTV and advertising operations. We’d hear every cycle that a massive, highly effective GOTV operation was cranking up to make the big difference in the election, but I never saw clear evidence of what, exactly, that operation was.

This is a great look at the basic swindle that's going on in the GOP.  It turns out to be practically nothing more than a microcosm of what that "party" has been trying to do to the whole world.  The approach is the same old trickle down crap - "if you pay the Operatives lots of money, they'll turn around and pay their staffers well, and then the staffers will have enough to go out and make the magic happen".  Everybody down the chain thinks he's a mover and a shaker, so he takes a nice big cut, and delegates the task down the line to the next guy.  So, by the time it gets to where something's supposed to get done, there's not much money left to make it happen.

Case in point (Breitbart, via Balloon Juice):

Project Orca was supposed to enable poll watchers to record voter names on their smartphones, by listening for names as voters checked in. This would give the campaign real-time turnout data, so they could redirect GOTV resources throughout the day where it was most needed. They recruited 37,000 swing state volunteers for this.

--snip--

Then at 6PM they admitted they had issued the wrong PINs to every volunteer in Colorado, and reissued new PINs (which also didn't work). Meanwhile, counties where we had hundreds of volunteers, such as Denver Colorado, showed zero volunteers in the system all day, but we weren't allowed to add them. In one area, the head of the Republican Party plus 10 volunteers were all locked out. The system went down for a half hour during peak voting, but for hundreds or more, it never worked all day. Many of the poll watchers I spoke with were very discouraged. Many members of our phone bank got up and left.
I do not know if the system was totally broken, or if I just saw the worst of it. But I wonder, because they told us all day that most volunteers were submitting just fine, yet admitted at the end that all of Colorado had the wrong PIN's. They also said the system projected every swing state as pink or red.

To me, this looks like the Operatives are all doing everything they could possibly do to put as much of that money as possible into their own pockets, while spinning the yarn back up to the Campaign Managers that everything was peachy dandy.

mistermix:

One of my core prejudices is that big consulting firms can’t write software. They’re a bunch of fast-talking MBAs who bullshit management into buying their services, and after they get the contract, all they care about is how cheap they can offshore a project, and how many hours they can bill. Well, Mitt Romney, the biggest consultant of them all, had to eat his own dogfood on Tuesday, and it was a goddam unappetizing meal.

I seem to recall stories of how totally fucked up everything was in the USSR all through the 80s - beyond the Kremlin, anywhere anybody looked, all they saw was empty factories and empty stores and empty streets.  But in Moscow, there was always a parade or a bunch of shiny things to look at, and lots of happy talk about the glories of the Soviet.

More recently, there's the story of how Sadam Hussein "totally fooled" the CIA into thinking he had WMD, or was "on the verge" of acquiring them.  But the real story was that after the Gulf War, Sadam's whole program collapsed, and it turned out that the people he was paying to develop the nukes for him thru the 90s were taking the money and submitting bogus reports of their "progress".  And the same thing happened with his Chem and Bio Weapons.  They just scammed the shit out of him.  And when we invaded, he had nothing.  Prob'ly came as quite a shock.

The power players in the GOP are mostly just like Romney.  They've spent their whole lives figuring out how to get somebody else to do the work while they count the money. And when suddenly they find that everybody under them has seen their example and learned to do exactly the same thing, they're surprised and they feel betrayed, but somehow they can't quite figure out what could possibly have gone so wrong.

Here's a thought:  The GOP always talks a good game about individuals and personal effort, but then they run political campaigns that are always top-down and tightly controlled.  Meanwhile they criticized the Dems for being all about Big Government and central planning when the truth is that Obama had a few people on the ground in thousands of locations who were given basic instructions and plenty of support, but who were also free to make it happen the way it needed to happen in their precincts.

And finally - which party just got its ass kicked for the second time in a row by a punk-ass community organizer and a bunch of wussie libruls?

Eat it, bitches.