As I’ve mentioned in The Daily Sausage on more than one occasion, the Republican party is absolutely overrun with grifters and snake oil salesmen. New York Magazine‘s Jonathan Chait has an excellent book that covers this in detail: “The Big Con: Crackpot Economics and the Fleecing of America”.
However, extolling the virtues (and there are many) of Jonathan Chait are not why we’re here.
Rather, we’re here to discuss an immensely fascinating look at what happens when conservatives pull back the curtain and realize they’ve just been hoodwinked to the tune of a billion dollars and a national election.
As I’ve mentioned previously, my career is in information security. Specifically, risk assessment and risk management. This includes project management, software development, and a variety of other fields. Consequently, when I heard that IT played an immense role in both the Obama campaign’s victory, as well as the Romney campaign’s defeat, well… Let’s just say my interest was piqued. From a purely professional standpoint, of course.
Before we proceed, a quick warning.
WARNING: CONSERVATIVE BLOGOSPHERE LINKS AHEAD!
Now that we have that out of the way…
RedState (Ben Howe) – “Campaign Sources: The Romney Campaign was a Consultant Con Job”
The article opens with a quick condemnation of the Romney Campaign’s “Project ORCA”, a computer system that was intended to provide real-time demographic and voter feedback to the Romney Campaign, as well as provide an effective organizing platform for volunteers and precincts during the election. It was touted as being worlds better than what the Obama campaign had created in 2008. The truth: it didn’t work at all, and diverted massive financial and human resources away from getting out the conservative vote.
For an overview on the big pile of epic fail that was Project ORCA, Ace of Spades has a great first-person primer.
What is Project Orca? Well, this is what they told us:
Project ORCA is a massive undertaking – the Republican Party’s newest, unprecedented and most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 presidential election.Pretty much everything in that sentence is false. The “massive undertaking” is true, however. It would take a lot of planning, training and coordination to be done successfully (oh, we’ll get to that in a second). This wasn’t really the GOP’s effort, it was Team Romney’s. And perhaps “unprecedented” would fit if we’re discussing failure.
Ars Technica also has a more indepth look, comparing Project ORCA to Project Narwhal, it’s Obama Campaign equivalent.
IT projects are easy scapegoats for organizational failures. There’s no way to know if Romney could have made up the margins in Ohio if Orca had worked. But the catastrophic failure of the system, purchased at large expense, squandered the campaign’s most valuable resource—people—and was symptomatic of a much bigger leadership problem.
Howe goes on to ask the fundamental question: “What caused the breakdown and why didn’t it get fixed in time?”.
Any time you’re working with a large and complex system in a time sensitive environment, every second of downtime counts. It’s why you test the bejesus out of the system before you ever roll it into production, and then you test it some more before you hand it over to your end users, who will inevitably find new and ingenious ways to break it. Not only that, but you have a backup plan in place for when it does inevitably go down (which it will, at the worst possible moment).
Well, the Romney campaign utterly failed on pretty much all of these counts. Why did they fail? The Bain bane of every corporate IT staff: consultants.
Seeing the Romney campaign flush with wackjob billionaire cash, a handful of consultants latched on to the Romney campaign like lampreys on the belly of a shark and bled it dry to the tune of $100 million, or one tenth of the total campaign budget, implementing a system that never worked and may, in fact, have cost Romney the election.
Good grifting is an art form, and this was a grifting Picasso.
Now, what makes this really special isn’t just the fact that the Romney campaign blew 10% of their budget on an IT system that they didn’t understand and was never going to work. That’s pretty much par for the course any time you have an IT project lead by MBA/manager-types that don’t know squat about enterprise-level technology solutions.
No, what makes this really special is the reaction from RedState’s commentariat, realizing that they’ve been conned.
iowaguy:
David Frum said (in regards to this election and specifically the predictions that were made) : “Republicans have been fleeced, exploited, and lied to by a conservative entertainment complex.” I can’t agree more and it makes me angry.
David Frum, by the way, has been KILLING IT for the last few days. Of course, it’ll never wash the blood off his hands from being an architect of the War in Iraq, but still.
I donated to the Romney campaign. Not much, but it was what [I]
acould afford. I think it came out to about $300. That’s grocery money to feed my family. That’s gas money to get my kids to school and for me to get to work. And this is how it was spent? To line the pockets of wealthy charlatans? Words can’t describe how angry this makes me. And this “good man” allowed this to go on right under his nose. Mitt Romney owes me and a lot of other Americans a huge apology.
Apparently they forgot to read the small print on the Romney campaign’s donation site: NO REFUNDS.
THANK YOU for bringing this to light. I’m starting to sound like a broken record here, but : DATA IS KILLING US.
We ARE the party of reason, and logic. We are the ones that actually know what we’re talking about, and stand firm. We need to run these charlatans out of town on a rail, and start over NOW. No more listening to wishful thinking polls ( *cough* Karl Rove, Scott Rassmussen *cough*). No more trusting the “elites”!
No, you ARE not. If you WERE, then you might have avoided this debacle in the first place.
Now, we get into the REALLY funny stuff.
AthenaDelphi:
Please remember – software programs are mostly written in California by liberals who then get venture capitalists to help them become billion dollar companies on the NYSE.
I’m curious now as to who WROTE the code for ORCA? What were their political affiliations? Just wunderin’….
Yes. A bunch of nerdy liberal saboteurs infiltrated a top-secret Republican party project for the sole purpose of torpedoing it, ensuring that President Obama would win re-election. Actually, on second thought, if that were an actual book I’d read the shit out of it.
And finally, the pièce de résistance. From wbb1950:
In my view, none of these explanations suffice. If you set aside conventional wisdom and connect the cots, it becomes obvious that reason Romney lost because the election process itself was rigged–to a degree most of us neither realize, comprehend, or care to admit. The conventional response to that statement is predictable: Tell me who rigged this election and how they did that, so I can disprove what you say, and dismiss you as a tin foil hat job! No thank you. I am not walking into that trap. I will merely refer you to something Ben Hogan said when he was asked a question about his classic golf swing: “Dig it out of the ground like I did”. If you investigate the possibility that the election was rigged rather than dismissing it out of hand, and if you are educable, then it is quite possible you will learn something in the process.
To that end, the following fact patterns and anomalies are material:
1. In 2008, John McCain was leading in the polls six weeks before the election. Then came the financial crash. Thereafter he lost the election.
2. Financial markets have been known to crash like this, once every eighty years.
3. Human beings have the ability to cause markets to crash. Soros did this in Britain in 1992, and in Asia in 1998
4. In 2012, Mitt Romney was surging in the polls a week before the election. Then came the hurricane Sandy. Thereafter he lost the election.
5. No prior hurricane has devastated all major battleground states to this degree. Was this the long awaited Was this the long awaited October surprise?
6. Human beings have the ability to manipulate weather patterns. Bush 43 set up project HAARP to generate sand storms in Iraq. Obama has expanded it
7. Voting machines in swing states switched Romney votes to Obama. How widespread this was has not been determined.
8. The DNC targeted Republican Allen West.
9. His vote count changed abruptly, he lost, and a court ordered recount is now in progress
10 The Obama campaign designed its website to accept illegal foreign donations.
11 One of his foreign bundlers Roach is closely connected to the government of Red China.
12 Obama received a wall of untraceable money– with hidden strings attached to it.
13 Would a market crash or a hurricane visited on the largest battleground states on the eve of the election favor the candidate who advocates big government?
14 Would a market crash or a hurricane divert public attention from a massive cheating operation in battleground states? Or from the Benghazi scandal?
15 Would a mind capable of dropping bombs on a civilian population have moral compunctions against crashing markets and creating storms to secure political power?
Either you believe in multiple coincidences, or you do not. If you believe in them, then you will accept the conventional wisdom and fail to connect the dots. That is how your mind works. But if these fact patterns and anomalies make you curious, or even a trifle suspicious, given all that is at stake, then you will get the sense that maybe–just maybe, you are not being told the truth, and you may find yourself repeating the words of Marc Anthony:” Oh mischief thou art afoot”.
Oh. My God. I mean, I thought I was well versed in conservative conspiracy theories, but this is a complex (and completely insane) narrative.
Let me sum up. Barack Obama originally won election over John McCain by organizing a secret cabal of Wall Street financiers to deliberately tank the global economy. In the intervening four years, he instructed (presumably) the Department of Defense to develop HAARP technology that would allow him to control the weather to the point of being able to generate a hurricane. He also instructed the DNC to specifically target Florida Congressman Allen West (presumably because West, as a former military officer, might be familiar with whatever the signs of a HAARP-generated hurricane would be and would blow the whistle on the whole plot). In the midst of all this, he struck a deal with China for large amounts of untraceable campaign funding. Finally, just when it looked like Mitt Romney was going to make a game out of it, Obama used the now-perfected HAARP technology to generate a hurricane that slammed into the East Coast, primarily New York and New Jersey (already Democratic strongholds), for the purpose of demonstrating the value of big government, thus costing Mitt Romney the Presidency.
It takes a really special person to come up with that.
But really, what we’re looking at here is a classic case of an inept chief executive throwing money at his management team to come up with a competitor to a massively successful and bitter rival’s smash-hit product, without ever taking the time to understand the product they’re trying to duplicate and eventually surpass.
Really though, if I’m one of the flim-flam men behind this, I’m not sweating a bunch of commenters on RedState. No, I’m sweating guys like Sheldon Adelson, the Koch Brothers, and Foster Friess, whose return on their massive political investments was virtually non-existent. The fact is, you don’t get to be worth a gazillion dollars like these guys are by making horrifically bad investments like the ones they did in the Romney/Ryan campaign. Those numbers are just brutal, and should be career-enders for everyone involved.
