I can quote a few excerpts, but it’s worth reading the whole article.
The authors Twitter feed is here: https://twitter.com/JohnEkdahl
People are on it complaining about the total disorganization.
A friend just forwarded that to me. The Romney campaign had access to so much money, yet they gambled their entire GOTV operation on what looks like the work of free interns with no software development experience.
There were so many times that people said “wow, he really stepped on it there…” Now, all the back end information is coming out and it sounds like Romney amassed a crew of completely clueless people. This is really hard to believe coming from the “great business expert” that Romney claimed to be. I can’t wait for the ‘behind the scenes’ movie. I’ve worked cleaning up those sorts of ‘businesses’ and they are such totally toxic environments. You really can’t help the toxicity of the environment when the technology is totally crapping on everything they try to do.
Bush and Palin are actually starting to look less and less incompetent by comparison.
Maybe the ability to organize a campaign and a successful GOTV operation, or to choose the right people to do so for you, is itself a test of executive ability. Sort of a filter for the ability to run a large organization. Failure at this may indicate that this is not a person we want in the White House. Thoughts?
The campaign canceled credit cards before staffers could even get home that night(and without telling them), leaving them to pay for their own cab.
Forbes
Wouldn’t that be consistent with Rand? Once they were no longer useful, why waste any more money on them? How do you think Bain Capital turned all those companies around? By dropping all their obligation (read, bankruptcy, laying pensions off on the Federal tax payer, etc)
I’m thinking that the credit cards were scheduled to be turned off in advance and they never thought through the fact that their staffers might actually expect to go home after midnight or maybe need to travel back home from where they were working.
This, ultimately, was why I voted Obama in 2008. I was not initially convinced that he had the chops for the job but after watching how he handled first the formidable Clinton campaign and then all the crap the GOP threw at him, I had to admit he ran a tight ship.
I only wish he governed as effectively (although I have no regrets about voting for him).
According to Brad DeLong, the President puts in roughly 90 hours a week. 30 are ceremonial. 30 involve coalition maintenance. And 30 are devoted to policy. Maybe he addresses a dozen topics a week.
All three require people skills. Lots of CEOs have those skills - but not all. Romney was a salesman/spreadsheet guy. I figured he wouldn’t make the same sorts of mistake that GWBush did: for example, I thought that Romney at least would know how to run a meeting and know how to ask pointed questions of his subordinates.
Remarkably, Romney flubbed the ceremonial stuff: while Obama is perhaps the nation’s greatest living orator, Romney couldn’t visit the UK without insulting one of our allies. Holding 2 fundraising parties - one in UK, one in Israel - wasn’t especially classy either.
Romney worked with a pretty small team at Bain. I’m guessing his management skills weren’t all that hot. He’s a pretty awkward guy after all. Those who read the link found that the mandatory nightly telephone conferences run by ORCA were high on marketing and low on substantive information. When they finally received the strike lists, they were 60 page emailed .pdfs. Gang, you really should have fed-exed that stuff. Or at least warned your crew ahead of time that they would have to print that out. Not everyone has an operational printer at home.
Conservatives joked about Obama’s community organizing. But he came to Chicago with the suit on his back and ended his stint with an office of about a dozen. He had solid people skills. And a former editor of the Yale Law Journal and Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago has solid policy chops as well.
Obama sought out and located foreign policy experts who would shift the battle into Pakistan, and towards those who would do us harm. Romney signed up a bunch of neo-con deadenders: I’m not sure he was even aware of the rather substantial realpolitik tradition among elder conservatives. There’s a reason why our foreign partners thought that Romney was a joke.
Well, he had to hire on-shore, so he was in unknown territory.
One of my favorite parts of the ORCA story is how they didn’t have the website set up to automatically redirect to a SSL encrypted page, instead of dumping all regular http requests on the floor. The redirect is so trivial even I can do it (and do, by default. It’s so easy there’s no reason not to.).
The assumption that everybody can print a 60 page PDF at home at the last minute with no warning is also pretty egregious.
OK, this is amusing. It turns out that this “Orca” was supposed to be their answer to the Obama’s campaign’s Narwhal. They erroneously named it that because according to them the orca is the only predator of the narwhal; in reality it isn’t, so the failure literally started with the naming of the project and rolled on from there. Narwhal was also much more sophisticated - even if Orca had worked, it wouldn’t have been remotely in the same league or performed the same functions - and unlike Orca they actually tested the thing before the election. You know, like you are supposed to do with software.
Interestingly, it so happens that the 2008 Obama campaign did have something like Orca (called Houdini), and it too crashed on election day; it appears the Obama campaign learned how to avoid that mistake, and Romney’s didn’t.
Probably bullshit, but it’s interesting to think about.
It may not have mattered so much, probably just the Republicans looking for boogey-men to explain how they got robbed. My understanding is that the software wasn’t much more than a digital form of standard old-fashioned ward politics, keeping track of who your voters are, whether or not they have voted, etc. With a computer, you can do in one second what otherwise might have taken a whole ten. If that’s true, then Anonymous is full of beans, there being no connection between GOTV and vote tabulation, save for the actual voting.
Anonymous should stick to writing old folk songs.
At any rate, all ORCA could effectively do is the same shit only faster, GOTV-wise. And the Republicans didn’t have any problem getting their people out, the problem was not enough people, period. If ORCA had worked perfectly, no one would have noticed. "Oh, look at the shiny new thing! I’m told they call it a ‘database’! "
Or, perhaps it was sabotage by Anonymous under orders from the Soros/AORN/Occupy revolutionary cadre. I find that idea pleasant and chortlesome, so it probably isn’t true.
I’m sure it’s total bullshit. That’s some very childish anony-bragging right there.
People have been saying for years - I’m one of them - that politics and government are not business. The business world is not good background for a politician; CEOs have no good track record in office. They may even be inversely correlated; politicians seldom succeed as CEOs after they leave office. That a supposition rather than an assertion, though.
There is a small but highly influential and free-spending component to the Republican Party that refuses to believe this in any way, shape, or form. A larger and noisier group among the blogosphere praise business and businesspeople and insist that running America like a business is the only way to proceed.
This is nuts in every way. I predict that the last nominees on their feet in 2016 will all be not just politicians, but career politicians. Marco Rubio is one. So is Paul Ryan, except for a few years after college. Chris Christie was a prosecutor and lobbyist but never a businessman. Jeb Bush spent a few years in the private sector but was never a CEO the way his brother was. That’s the direction of the party, even if none of these specifically become the nominee.
Not just people, I had to take a class about is as part of a business master’s degree. Public sector is not and is not intended to be like a for profit business.
BUT, if they want to keep pushing the idea, I say we make OSHA, INS and other enforcement agencies self funding by raising fines through the roof and demanding immediate payment (even if it means we have to auction off the company jets to get the money). So, you want to defraud medicare? They’ll start out at $1 million dollar fine (for each transaction) and we’ll play by Wells Fargo rules where we just take the money and stare blankly as we ask “didn’t you read the fine print in our new fees schedule?”
It was really the revenge of the nerds against the Romney bully frat boy. 
I fear there is a misunderstanding. Digging a bit, Anonymous was referring to a different Orca, the one Karl Rove not of Romney. Here’s a snippet from their 6 November 2012 letter: Greetings to the good people of the Velvet Revolution
8 November 2012
…After a rather short time, we identified the digital structure of Karl’s operation and even that of * his * ORCA. This was an easy task in that barn doors were left open and the wind swept us inside.
So what do we do with these doors? Do we lead them open and catch the thieves as they steal the prize? Or do we close them so they cannot steal the prize?
Our decision – protect the citizens.
We coded and created, what we call, The Great Oz. A targeted password protected firewall that we tested and refined over the past weeks. We place this code on more than one of the digital tunnels and their destination’s that Karl’s not so smart worker bees planned to use on election night. We noticed that these tunnels were strategically placed to allow for tunnel rats[2] to race to the server sewers[3] from three different states. Ah yes, Karl tried o make it appear that there were more than three but we quickly saw the folly of his ploy. … Italics added. The point is that they didn’t claim to hack Romney-HQ, but rather Rove’s American Crossroads. http://samuel-warde.com/2012/11/did-anonymous-block-carl-roves-attempt-to-steal-election/
No more plausible, though.
And not it appears they are trying to blame one guy, Dan Centinello, for the ‘Project ORCA’ failure.
http://buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20121121/CITYANDREGION/121129878/1002
I thought they were advertising their ORCA project/app as ‘bigger and better than Obama’s GOTV efforts.’ (ha!)
Now, the failure of that same project/app is the fault of some single mid-to-low level staffer?
That just doesn’t make any sense.