Let’s Not Disturb the GOP’s Delusion

I got one of those self-serving mass emails today from that sleaze Dick Morris, who had been predicting a Mitt landslide.

He says that O won because of Sandy and because Mitt’s “Orca” get-out-the-vote computer app didn’t work.

I think if the GOP wants to believe they’ll win so long as there is no hurricane and they fix their app, that they don’t need to fix themselves, why not let them labor under that delusion and keep losing?

For a party that preaches personal responsibility, they certainly seem incapable of internalizing that message.

For a party that criticizes Obama’s “gifts” to get votes, they’re certainly fond of their “carried interest” gift that lets Mitt and his friends pay a lower tax rate than I do on far less income.

 

Data-Driven Mitt Couldn’t Do the Math

From “Why Romney Never Saw It Coming,” John Dickerson, Slate:

“In the final 10 days of the race, a split started to emerge in the two campaigns. The Obama team would shower you with a flurry of data—specific, measurable, and they’d show you the way they did the math. Any request for written proof was immediately filled. They knew their brief so well you could imagine Romney hiring them to work at Bain. The Romney team, by contrast, was much more gauzy, reluctant to share numbers, and relying on talking points rather than data. This could have been a difference in approach, but it suggested a lack of rigor in the Romney camp. On Election Day, the whole Romney ground-game flopped apart. ORCA, the much touted computer system for tracking voters on Election Day, collapsed. It was supposed to be a high-tech approach to poll-watching, a system by which campaign workers would be able to track who voted. Those who had not yet voted could therefore be identified and then have volunteers tasked to finding them and getting them to the polls. ORCA was supposed to streamline the process, but it was never stress-tested. Field operatives never saw a beta version. They asked to see it, but were told it would be ready on Election Day. When they rolled it out Tuesday, it was a mess. People couldn’t log on and when they did, the fields that were supposed to be full of data were empty. “I saw a zero and I knew I wasn’t supposed to be seeing a zero,” said one campaign worker. A war room had been set up in the Boston Garden to monitor ORCA’s results, but in the end Romney and Ryan had to watch CNN to find out how their campaign was doing.  In the end, the numbers guy was deprived of his numbers in more ways than one.”

Not real impressive for a Harvard MBA, is it?