Project ORCA shows Mittens at his (incompetent) best

If you're curious about how competent a manager, I mean President, Mittens would have been - take a look at this post about "Project ORCA", the Romney/GOP get-out-the-vote effort. Suffice to say: it didn't go according to any alleged plan they might have had. :-)

Getting poll watchers and voters to the polls is an intricate business; you have to have a plan, especially when you're covering more than, oh I don't know, one precinct. You really need a plan when you've got 30,000 people ready and eager to do their thing. And they can't because you didn't plan. It's always the details, isn't it? :-) Not getting their "packets" of information on time or at all, having to print the 60+ pages out, no "poll watcher certificates", no training, no support, a website that didn't work properly, and a fiasco for a get-out-the-vote effort. It takes a good project manager to manage all of that, and I'd guess you'd need almost 6 months to make it all happen; a year if you count the need to recruit volunteers.

As John Ekdahl, the post author says, there's an interesting point to be made about a party and campaign argument that devolving things to the local level is better while simultaneously centralizing everything in a city that's actually quite far from the base. What it tells me is what I've actually suspected all along: Mittens wasn't about state control, he's all about control. Often for its own sake. He wouldn't devolve things back to the states - he'd make sure he wasn't employed making Big Decisions, but an endless series of mid-manager decisions. The simple fact is the man has no concept of "vision", never mind "strategy". It's why he couldn't communicate a vision for America - he didn't have one! Neither did Paul Ryan, come to that. He's more about making the machine barely enough operate and wondering why child labor laws were implemented.

The thing about it, Mitt Romney's campaign should have known the ground game was where it could won or lost - but they believed their own hyperbole. And they were astonishingly incompetent, in places where it counted (explaining his economic "policies") and where it should have been a done deal (getting out the vote). For all the chatter of the man's vaunted management skills, he's shown himself to be an ineffective and arbitrary micromanager who runs astonishingly incompetent organizations. I'm sure glad Mr Obama is still the President. :-)

Carolyn Ann