ANALYSIS - Election 2012: Image World

Election 2012: Image World (15)

A. D. Coleman from Photo Critic International  

Posted: 13 Nov 2012 08:55 PM PST

Post-Season Wrap-Up (c)

According to a BBC report, the word “omnishambles” has been named “word of the year” by the Oxford English Dictionary: “The word — meaning a situation which is shambolic from every possible angle — was coined in 2009 by the writers of BBC political satire The Thick of It.” Putting an American spin on it, we get Romneyshambles: Any political project with Mitt Romney at its helm. Which explains why the most telling parodies of the campaign have Romney, not Obama, as their target.
Mitt Romney’s claim to superiority over Barack Obama consisted almost entirely of the fact that he had business and managerial and financial expertise that Obama presumably lacked. Yet, in truth, Romney emerged from his ineffectual campaign as a demonstrably unqualified administrator of an enterprise doomed to failure by its many terminal flaws, most significantly Romney’s own incompetence at organizational oversight, human resource management, fiscal strategy, product branding, public relations, and leadership in general.
Despite his pampered upbringing and privileged whitebread life, Romney proved himself less capable at all of those basic executive tasks than a mixed-race street-smart guy 14 years his junior who’d never run even a small business. (In this I share the opinion of Frederick E. Allen, Leadership Editor of Forbes.) In short, in his role as senior executive of a project that he had to build from the ground up (rather than tear down), Romney couldn’t cut it. In every verifiable way, Willard Mitt Romney is Barack Hussein Obama’s inferior.

Project Orca vs. Project Narwhal

Project Orca smartphone view.

To see how this played out in terms of digital technology, click here for a detailed analysis of the Romney campaign’s disastrous “Project Orca,” the election-day “killer app” that wasn’t. This poll-monitoring web app was endorsed by Zac Moffatt, Digital Director for the Romney campaign and co-founder of Targeted Victory. The app wasn’t deployed to its intended 30,000 users until November 5 in beta release, it required familiarity with and printing out of a 60-page PDF training manual plus voter rolls that also wasn’t delivered to them (via email) until the evening before Election Day. After which it crashed.
This massive fail didn’t doom Romney and Ryan; their cause was already lost by dawn on November 6, when they awoke to a shitstorm they didn’t see coming because they wore blinders. But it certainly put the last nail in their coffins.(Which they can blame in part on know-nothings like Peggy Noonan, who in July 2011 derided Team Obama’s hiring of specialists in predictive modeling and data mining as “politics as done by Martians.”)
They’d named their effort Project Orca after the killer whale for which the Narwhal (the codename of Team Obama’s robust, successful counterpart IT program) is natural prey. If you want some laughs, click here for a video of the overconfident Gail Gitcho, Communications Director for Team Romney, explaining on November 5 how far ahead of Team Obama this software put them. (Here’s Romney, who knows nothing about IT, boasting in-house on November 1 about how Project Orca gives him an “unprecedented advantage on election day.”)
Obama, by contrast, not only ran the country with relative adroitness during his first term, but assembled and supervised a brilliantly successful reelection campaign at the same time. Click here for insight into the IT wizards behind the can of whup-ass he opened on the hapless Romney. Click here for a report on the Obama-Biden campaign’s involvement with behaviorial scientists. Click here for an overall analysis of how those combined to forge the November 6 triumph. And click here for a PDF file of VoteBuilder, the user manual for the Democratic Party app used by Team Obama, built on open-source code.

Romney Shafts His Staff

ABC News screenshot, January 24, 2012.

Yes, I’m gloating. Again. Still. Not an admirable character trait, I acknowledge. But Mitt Romney made this very personal for me with his “47 percent” speech, so I’m finding it deeply satisfying to know that all his money couldn’t buy him the one thing he wanted most in life, that swivel chair behind the desk in the Oval Office. Oh hubris, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling?
Peggy Noonan got one thing right in that July ’11 screed, though she mistakenly applied it to Obama. Certainly it fits Romney better: “He is a loser. And this is America, where nobody loves a loser.” So the Mormon answer to Richie Rich has gone off to sulk en famille in some of his many mansions, starting with the one in San Diego, we’re told. But he and his cronies continue to lie, to themselves and everyone else.

Mitt Romney, concession speech, Boston, 11-7-12, screenshot.

Worth noting that, as he was delivering his hastily cobbled-together concession speech early on November, in which he fervently thanked all those who’d worked on his behalf, his campaign was pulling the plug on them. As RawStory.com and others reported, “Campaign workers were left to pull themselves up by their bootstraps when they found that all the credit cards issued by Romney/Ryan 2012 were canceled as soon as the nominee finished his concession speech.”
That’s what you get for lovin’ Mitt. And that’s what you call a sucker punch. For the record: The fact that Willard Mitt Romney was a sucker for the lies fed to him by his support system doesn’t make the blow that knocked him out a “sucker punch,” in the words of an unnamed Romney adviser. As a headline at the Daily Kos put it, “Romney lost because Obama beat him.” Fair and square. Not with a sucker punch (with its insinuation of trickery) but with a roundhouse right that flattened him. No chicanery, no “voter suppression” (pace the flatulent Karl Rove). Just effective political campaigning, U.S.-style.

Playing the Long Game

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